What is Contact Rating in Mailchimp?

Mailchimp has this very useful in-built feature called Contact Rating. This is something that will allow you to analyse your contacts and help you have a better understanding of your contacts. It also helps to improve your email engagement in the MailChimp. 

In this blog, we will discuss what contact rating is, why it is important and how you can improve it.

What is Contact Rating on MailChimp?

Contact Rating is a score which allows you to determine which subscriber in your audience list is the most active. Each of your audience receives this scoring. These scores are called either Contact Rating or Member Rating. Regular and A/B testing emails are only included while monitoring for the rating. Ads, automations and landing pages are not included in this score. 

How does it Work?

Mailchimp uses a 16 point scale to calculate the engagements by contacts. The two main aspects of this calculation are “open rate” and “click rate”. 

To determine the rating for the contact, Mailchimp measures the contact’s click activity against your email send frequency. Mailchimp recalculates the ratings each time you send an email campaign. In this case, thinking in terms of averages can be helpful. This means that contacts who don’t click a link in monthly emails are scored differently than those who don’t click a link in weekly emails. 

Star Rating and It’s meaning

1 Star Rating – ⭐☆☆☆☆

This can be possibly due to 3 reasons. Either unsubscribed, or re-subscribed, or past soft bounces

2 Star Rating – ⭐⭐☆☆☆

There has been no engagement. Most likely, this contact is a new contact, or a previously engaged contact who has gone inactive.

3 Star Rating – ⭐⭐⭐☆☆

A low level of engagement. This contact clicks some links in your campaigns. Their engagement is either inconsistent, or they have not been in your audience long enough to earn a higher rating.

4 Star Rating – ⭐⭐⭐⭐☆

Engagement is moderate. When you send your campaigns to this contact, they often click the links.

5 Star Rating – ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

A high level of engagement. Your campaigns are consistently clicked by this contact.

As a result, you know from contact ratings that subscribers with three to five stars are engaged with your campaigns. Thus, three to five star contacts are likely to purchase more than one or two star contacts.

Ratings for New Contact

All new contacts begin with a rating of two stars, which is equal to zero on the engagement score scale.  Simply put, either the contact gets a higher score or a lower score based on their activities. 

Positive Engagement

According to Mailchimp, positive engagement is the subscriber who opens the email regularly. The Mailchimp also monitors the click rate on all your email campaigns. The more often the contact clicks the link the more likelihood of getting a higher score. 

Negative Engagement

There are three ways that Mailchimp considers to give negative engagement. If the contact files a complaint on you or the contact unsubscribes you or their email address gets bounced gives negative engagement, which eventually lowers their score. The contact’s score remains to stay in two stars, if they remain unengaged, or they don’t click links in your emails.

How to use contact rating to your Advantage?

We know what contact rating is and how that works. Now how to use this feature to benefit the most.

Segmentation

The best way to utilise this contact rating is to create segmentation. You can easily make the audience segment. You can segment these contacts into two categories. First category is for the contacts with one star and the second category is for the contacts with three, four and five stars. As discussed earlier, contacts with one star are very unlikely to purchase or make subscriptions to your products/ services. They are simply costing your money. And the contacts with three, four and five stars are very likely to purchase or make a subscription to your product or service. They have awareness about your brand. 

It is best to have a separate campaign for each category to target these audiences. 

Here are some other advantages of contact ratings.

Target engaged contacts

Send a targeted campaign to your four- and five-star contacts with an offer for their business, such as a promotion, discount, or other perk. For example, provide free shipping or a discount on a well-liked item.

Re-engage with your dormant contacts

Most audiences have several contacts who aren’t engaged with your email campaigns and are mostly inactive. To encourage people to reconnect with your brand, target contacts who have a poor contact rating. Send a special offer, for example, advertise a giveaway or contest.

Clear Your Email List

You can utilize contact ratings to locate and delete inactive contact from your audience list if you’ve decided they can’t be re-engaged. You can also delete their email campaigns while cleaning your list. Your subscriber base decreases, which can decrease your monthly bill as Mailchimp charges per subscribed email contact. If you pay for a subscription or pay-as-you-go then removing inactive contacts will benefit you.

Conclusion

We hope you have a better idea about contact rating and how that works. Overall this feature of Mailchimp helps you target the different stages of contacts. 

Thanks for reading!