How to qualify leads with Mailchimp

You’ve likely seen stars next to contacts in your Mailchimp list . From my experience delivering Mailchimp training, very few people know what the stars mean and how to use them.

What are the stars next to Mailchimp contacts?

The contact rating (this used to be called member rating) is a scale between one and five stars. All contacts start at two stars. The contact rating (number of stars) increase as the proportion of campaigns opened and clicked by the subscriber improves. Bounces (where a campaign couldn’t be delivered to the person) negatively affect the rating.

If a person has a one star contact rating then they likely aren’t opening nor clicking any of your campaigns and/or email messages sent to them are bouncing. A five star contact rating means that the person is likely opening and clicking almost every campaign sent to them. There are other factors that affect the star rating however opens, clicks and bounces are the primary influences.

How can I see all my engaged contacts?

Mailchimp make it very easy to identify those contacts that are engaged with your email marketing:

• Sort the Contact Rating column; if your list isn’t too large then you may click the words Contact Rating in the appropriate column to sort that column.
• Create a segment; a list segment may be created using the Contact Rating column field.

If you create a segment to, for example, identify all contacts with a three to five star rating then you may now send targeted email campaigns to your most engaged subscribers.

How the contact rating boosts your sales

One way that organisations use the contact rating is to identify sales prospects (i.e. as part of the sales funnel). Email marketing is very inexpensive in testing the engagement of contacts. The following process is followed in determining which leads are prospects:

1. A few email campaigns are sent to the contacts (leads).
2. When the contact rating for a subscriber changes to three stars the lead is now considered a prospect.

Now that the prospect has been identified a salesperson may personally call the prospect. Phoning every lead is very costly and so Mailchimp is used to identify those people that are (or aren’t) prospects. Phoning (or personally visiting) can then be used more effectively as the engaged contact (prospects) has already been identified.

As can be seen, Mailchimp can effectively used to determine prospects whilst reducing costs.