What are Mailchimp Contact Ratings?

One of the most useful metrics in understanding your Mailchimp subscribers is their member rating (also called contact rating). Unfortunately this incredibly useful data is little understood or known by Mailchimp users.

The member rating is a quality score for each of your subscribers. To explain simplistically, the member rating shows how active the contact is; one of the biggest influences on the rating is the proportion of email campaigns opened and clicked by the contact versus the number of email campaigns received by the contact.

Identifying Mailchimp subscribers most likely to buy

Brand awareness is a known predeterminant in influencing a purchasers decision of what product or service to purchase and from whom; if a consumer doesn’t know or remember that your service or product exist then they won’t actively seek you out when they have a need for your service or product. A high quality member rating gives us a clear indication that the consumer is interacting with your communication and therefore knows your brand and product or service.

Member ratings in Mailchimp are shown as a score between one and five stars for each contact. New subscribers are added to your list with two stars and as a contact attains higher quality they gain more stars whereas, conversely, subscribers that are one star aren’t engaged.

We know therefore through member ratings that any subscriber with three to five stars is engaged with our brand. These people may therefore be assumed as more likely to purchase than one or two star contacts.

How to use Member Ratings to your advantage

Of course the member rating doesn’t mean much if you can’t use the rating to your advantage. We can very easily view those contacts with various member ratings by using segments.

In Mailchimp training I usually recommend creating a segment for all one star subscribers and one for all subscribers with three, four or five stars. Then:

For one star subscribers

As inferred above, one star subscribers are unlikely to result in any sales. There are however usually only two reasons that people want to unsubscribe contacts with a one star member rating;

• One-star subscribers are costing money: Mailchimp charges per subscribed email address. If you pay for a Mailchimp subscription or pay-as-you-go then one-star rated contacts are costing you money.
• You want your open and click rates to look better: Unsubscribing low quality subscribers will make your reports look better 😉

Before unsubscribing your low quality contacts it’s probably best to first send a re-engagement campaign and then, if they don’t respond to that, unsubscribe the contact.
Please be aware that I mention unsubscribing and not deleting low quality contacts. By merely unsubscribing these contacts we are still able to target them with Facebook ads created within Mailchimp.

For three, four and five star subscribers

These (high quality) subscribers are engaged and familiar with our brand and offerings. These contacts are most likely to buy your products or services. It’s important to send targeted and personalized campaigns to these subscribers that add value for the subscriber. Fully engaged contacts are more likely to buy and spend more than the average consumer and out three, four and five star contacts are either fully engaged or are close to being fully engaged.

In summary, the Mailchimp member rating is a quality score for each of your subscribers. This member rating tells us which subscribers are engaged and therefore which are likely, or are unlikely, to be converted into paying customers (or repeat customers).