One thing that we’ve seen users try to do is track the signup location of your subscribers. This is useful for several reasons, mostly analytically. Perhaps you want to see if where they signed up has some sort of correlation with subscriber engagement. You could even set up personalized messages depending on this information with our conditional merge tags. Or maybe you just want to track where most of your subscribers are coming from so you know what your target market is.

Whatever the reasons, it’s certainly possible to track this data with a little setup within your MailChimp account and some knowledge about html form elements. We’ll show you how to add a hidden field to a list within your MailChimp account and then how to modify your embedded signup form so that you can start tracking.

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There are a ton of stats you can look at to measure your campaign performance (check out all the reporting options you get from MailChimp).

But which stats you use to measure success really depend on the type of emails you’re sending. If you send monthly newsletters, maybe you focus on opens (reader interest) and what URLs are clicked (their fav content). If you send transactional emails to a million people a day, all you probably care about is deliverability. If it’s one-to-one autoresponders, perhaps you check your overall conversion rate (using our ecommerce360 or google analytics api).

But what if you’re sending RSS-To-Email campaigns?

These emails go out automatically, and “behind the scenes.” Depending on your frequency settings, they could be sending daily. That means after a few months, you could have like 5 kajillion emails sent (double check my math).

Here’s what I mean…

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Oops, I can’t believe I forgot to mention during the launch of MailChimp v5 that we added tweet tracking to your MailChimp Site Analytics360 report. For those of you who don’t know, there’s a great big button under your MailChimp Reports tab where our Google Analytics users can get the ultimate birds-eye-view of how your email campaigns, CPC campaigns, and referrals influence traffic to your website. All from within MailChimp.

It’s called the Site Analytics360 report, which I used in this blog post to troubleshoot some strange open rate behavior in my email list (see: Why did my open rates change?)

Anyway, now we’re also showing your tweets on the report’s timeline, so you can see if (and how) twitter is affecting your overall site traffic. BTW, if you like stats and reports mashups, and you’re a blogger, you might also enjoy our WordPress Analytics Plugin (more than 23,000 downloads and counting).

What’s a good, average open rate? Our customers ask us that question all the time. So much so, that a few years ago we analyzed close to 300 million emails and posted our findings to ChimpCharts. Next, we embedded that data right into your campaign stats:

learn more about industry comparisons

But I send a lot of campaigns. Because I use MailChimp’s RSS-to-email tool wired up to this blog, I send almost daily. And I look at my stats all the time. So I already know my average open rate, and I already know my click rate, and I already know that I’m usually a few percentage points above industry average (c’mon, step it up a little Internet & Software industry!).

Nowadays, I find myself seeking anomalies in my stats instead…

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We run a series of MailChimp webinars every week, so we’ve got links all over our website pointing over to them. Our website testing guru Stephen wanted to test the word “webinar” against phrases like “online training” and “live training” and “MailChimp training.” He used Google’s Website Optimizer to run some A/B tests.

Turns out “online training” beats “webinar.” By a lot:

Simply changing the word “webinar” to “online training” boosted click-throughs to our landing page 101%.

Then we got to thinking. We send email invitations to people who register for those webinars. Would we get better results if we switched the words in our subject line the same way?

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