ClicData + MailChimp: Better, More Productive Email Reporting

We’re always super excited to add connectors to our BI platform. Each one gives our customers new access to some of their own data sets, allowing them to analyze, report on, and act on them for the first time. MailChimp is one of them.

Integrating MailChimp with ClicData gives marketing teams the ability to leverage their customer and contact data, make more precise marketing decisions, and drive more sales.

In fact, ClicData picks up where MailChimp leaves off—providing in-depth and insightful reporting from multiple data sources across your organization so you can:

• Understand your prospects and customers better
• Know more precisely where your sales are coming from
• Improve your omnichannel marketing strategy

In this article, we’ll point out the benefits of the ClicData and MailChimp integration, show you how to connect your marketing data to ClicData as well as a working dashboard example. By the end of this article, you will have everything you need to communicate the performance of your email campaigns to your team and your boss.

Why ClicData and MailChimp Are Better Together

As rich as Mailchimp’s feature set is, it’s still missing something important whenever you need insightful, authoritative reports to guide overall business decisions.

That is, you still need the ability to combine your MailChimp data with your other data sources—such as Google Analytics, Google Ads, social media, or even your CRM—to clearly understand where your audience is coming from, which marketing initiatives are driving more sales, and more.

In addition, you need to be able to communicate this information to your team and your boss so they can make informed decisions.

That’s exactly where ClicData comes in.

Understanding Your Audience Better

Let’s start with the most important point on our list: Understanding your audience.

Of course, MailChimp offers a reporting tool to use on the data generated by your MailChimp-designed email campaigns, social ads, and landing pages.

MailChimp even uses that data to provide you with recommendations based on your audience’s behavior and interests.

After all, as we all know by now, when the right custom email promotes the right product, is delivered at the right time, and to the right person, it goes a very long way.

“Email lists are an old standby of marketers, and they lend themselves well to personalization. Segmented lists with personalized email blasts have been shown to perform better than generic emails sent to an entire list. Don’t miss this opportunity to connect with your audience in a meaningful way.”

Christian Thomson,
CEO at Marwick Marketing

But as you know, your customer journey and how your customers relate to your brand don’t just come down to email campaigns alone.

Your customers engage with your brand on social media, they interact with your customer service or support team, and they might even come to your shop if you own a physical point of sale (POS).

Yet you don’t have all these valuable data points in your MailChimp reporting.

The ClicData business intelligence (BI) tool helps you take all of that one large step further. With ClicData, you connect and aggregate all of your business and customer data in a single cloud-based data warehouse.

That means you can pull data from your social media, Google Analytics, and Google Ads accounts, your CRM, as well as your financial system and point of sales—and glean higher-level and more insightful reporting from it.

It means you can build more holistic, broader-view reports, obtain a more exact picture of your customers’ buying behaviors, and make more effective business decisions.

Knowing With More Precision Where Your Sales Come From

For marketing and sales teams, knowing exactly what works and what doesn’t can be a tough challenge to figure out.

While you might clearly comprehend the power of integrated multichannel marketing strategies on conversions and sales, the connection between your social media campaigns, your SEO, and your emailing strategy can get murky.

You have a lot more questions than you do answers:

• What drove that spike in your sales last week?
• Was it the ads you just launched on Google Ads?
• Was it the blog post that included a product review that you published a few days ago?
• Or was it the post you shared on social media or the product highlight on the mobile app?
• Was it because someone promoted it in a video or blog article?
• Or perhaps it had something to do with the nice product display in your store?
• Plus, which customer segment was the most attracted to the product?

There’s only one way to get the answers to these important questions: You have to effectively merge all of the pertinent data into a single place and have the ability to compare the sales by channel, segment, device, region, whatever you see fit.

Once you have that, you can report the insights from the entire scope of data through one or more dashboards.

That empowers you, your team, and your boss to quickly and easily understand which actions and efforts support your business goals and which ones don’t.

Making Better Business Decisions

As a marketer in a small business, you’re responsible for every dime that comes and goes, so you can’t afford to let a campaign run that’s not performing for you.

You can’t afford to wait six months only to discover that it has generated no revenue or not earned a profit.

Bluntly, effective marketing isn’t just about creativity, copywriting, and project planning. It requires a strong data analytics effort and the ability to evaluate and measure virtually everything that your business does.

Relying on your data—as much of your business data as possible—is the only way for you to stay on top of what’s been performing well and what needs to be improved.

Let’s say the subscription cancellation rate to one of your main customer mailing lists is increasing. You want to know about it right away so you can investigate and find a solution for the leaking bucket. Otherwise, you’ll lose a crucial touch point with those customers, and, if you don’t act quickly, you could lose them completely.

The ability to make better business decisions relies on your having a holistic view of your business data, informed by access to virtually all of your business data sets and producing insightful, dynamic, intuitive reports.

You also need to know that your data is up-to-date and even get notified when certain benchmarks are met (or not) so you can respond appropriately and effectively.

With ClicData’s platform, you can always know that the data you’re looking at and making decisions based on is as up-to-date as you want it to be. You can have live data refreshes automatically scheduled and alerts sent to you when you want so you can stay on top of your critical data and KPIs.

In fact, if you want, you can give your whole team notifications and access to the data they need on a timely basis, accelerating and improving the decision-making process further.

How Does ClicData/MailChimp Integration Work?

A step by step guide

Integrating any data source with ClicData is easy. Don’t worry, no programming skills are needed! Our smart connectors and powerful automation tools do all the work for you.

1. Connect your MailChimp Data

• The first step is to launch a free trial on ClicData.
• Then, simply create a connection between your two accounts.

1. Got to the Data Connections tab
2. Click Add New
3. Select MailChimp in the list of connectors
4. Authorize the connection. You will be brought back to the MailChimp application. If you’re logged out, log back in and click “Authorize.”
5. That’s it!  You’ve now connected MailChimp and ClicData once and for all!

• You’re now able to import your data.

1. Go to your Data tab
2. Click Add New
3. Click on your MailChimp connection you just created and click Next

• You now have the list of datasets you can import.

• Select the dataset you want to report on and click Next

1. Name your dataset. For example: “Email Clicks Report”
2. Select the campaign in the Filter tab
3. Preview your data to make sure it looks good
4. Click Next
5. You’re done! In just a matter of minutes, you’ve created a connection and imported your first dataset in ClicData. Easy, right?

• Repeat the steps above for all of the data you want to import from MailChimp, but also from Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Google Analytics, Google Ads, and all your marketing applications.

2. Schedule your Data Refreshes and Custom Alerts

Your data is only useful to you if it’s current data, so the next step is to ensure that it is:

• Schedule your automated data refreshes

1. Click on the Schedule icon for the data you want to refresh and click New Schedule
2. Then, select the day, the time, or the frequency you want your data refreshed.

For example, you can schedule it every day at 9am to get your fresh data with your morning cup of coffee, schedule it before your marketing meeting every week, or up to every minute.

• Set up custom alerts on your data

Be automatically and immediately informed by notification or email when a certain threshold is reached.

1. From the same window that you created your Refresh schedule, click on New Schedule
2. Click Add a New Task
3. Choose the task Send Notification
4. Customize the message of the notification
5. Choose the users you want to send it to. (At first, your only choice is you. But it can change later if desired.)
6. Click Save

3. Build your Dashboard —Quickly

This is the fun part! ClicData has over 70 dashboard “widgets” you can choose from—including charts, maps, tables, graphics, and more—to help you display your data cleanly, clearly, and intuitively.

All of them are fully interactive, so you can create relationships between them, zoom in and out, and drill down to dig into the raw data.

Interactivity is critical to your success because it allows you to explore your data during your analysis. It’s also a great way to answer your team’s and boss’ questions at the moment, on-demand—and quickly—during your meetings.

You can import this dashboard into your account and use it with your own data. Or, you can build your own custom dashboard using the color palette, font, logo, and everything else that’s key to your brand.

• Build a custom dashboard

1. Go to the Dashboard tab

2. Click Add New –or click on Dashboard Templates to use our example

3. Give your dashboard a title

4. Choose the format you need—desktop, TV, tablet, mobile—depending on your dashboard audience, fonts, etc.

5. Click Create!

Now, you are on your dashboard designer interface. All you need to do is choose the chart you want to use and drag and drop it into the workspace. The Chart Properties window will automatically appear.

6. Click on Select Data Source and select your MailChimp dataset: “Email Clicks Report.” ClicData automatically populates the metrics available in your dataset. Drag and drop the ones you want to display in your chart. The preview shows you what your chart looks like in real-time.

7. Name your chart, add legends, and fine-tune its appearance in Style and Format tab

ClicData Tips: You can add your custom color palette in your dashboard settings.

Congratulations! You’ve created your first dashboard! You can now continue building your dashboard with all the KPIs you need to monitor.

11 KPIs For Your MailChimp Campaigns

To help you hit the ground running, here’s a list of valuable email and marketing key performance indicators (KPIs)—grouped by acquisitions, behaviors, and conversions—that you might want to include in your new company dashboards.

Use them to track the performance of your MailChimp campaigns and begin to see clearly what’s working and what’s not!

Acquisitions KPIs

1. The number of New Leads: Total # of people subscribing to your email list.

2. Subscription Rate per Landing Page: Percentage of people subscribing to your email list ÷ # of visitors to the landing page.

3. List Growth Rate: (Total # of new subscribers – Unsubscribes) ÷ Total # of email addresses on your list.

Behavior KPI

4. Open Rate: The # of emails opened ÷ Total # of emails sent

5. Click-through Rate (or Click-to-Open Rate): The number of clicks on the links in the email ÷ The number of emails opened.

6. Unengaged Subscribers: Total # of people who haven’t opened any email in the last 90 days.
 Learn how to re-engage these cold contacts

7. Email Bounce Rate (hard): Total # of soft and hard bounces ÷  Total # of emails sent.

8. Unsubscribe Rate per Email: The number of people unsubscribing from your email list ÷ The number of emails sent.

Conversion KPI

9. Revenue Per Campaign (in $): Sales generated ÷ The # of clicks on your email links

10. Average Revenue per Subscriber: Total revenue generated from your emails ÷ The # of contacts in your email list

11. ROI: Net profit ÷ Total investment * 100

Summary

Email marketing is a great way to connect with your audience and stay in touch with your customers in a meaningful way, and MailChimp is a powerful tool to help you do just that.

But when you integrate MailChimp with ClicData, you can go much further. You can leverage your prospect and customer data to help you make informed decisions and grow your sales pipeline.

With ClicData’s automated data integration and interactive dashboards, you can share metrics, benchmarks, goals, and insights with your team and with management, put manual reporting behind you, and finally focus on what matters the most: your data.

Try the ClicData and MailChimp integration today for free with your team.