Someone recently asked us, “Is there a way in MailChimp to find out my best day to send, based on my list’s history?” The answer is yes, and here’s how.
1. Log in to MailChimp
2. Go to the “Reports” tab, and click on this link under your graph:
That’ll download a spreadsheet to your computer. This file will contain stats for ALL your campaigns, ever. It’s an awesome file that will let you run your own reports in Excel, and build just about any pretty graph you or your boss could ever want. Internally, we at MailChimp call it the B.A.R.F. download (for “big ass report file”).
Okay, I’m the only person here who calls it that.
Anyway, open the file in Excel, then:
1. Sort data by the column “List” to get the data for the one list you’re looking for.
2. Delete all the other data to get it out of the way.
3. Sort data by the column “Send Weekday.”
4. Now look at the open rates for your various campaigns by day.
In excel, I made a formula to calculate the average open rate for each day. Assuming your list size is roughly the same from campaign to campaign (organic growth, no major imports, no drastic segmentation), you should be fine doing so.
Below is a screenshot. Looks like Tuesday averages highest for this particular list.
Want to know where we got the idea for the B.A.R.F. download?
Whenever we’ve met with MailChimp users in their workplace, they always sit down with us and ask us questions about their stats. Every single time, the person we’re meeting with has an Excel spreadsheet printed out. It’s amazing to see the different things they measure and compare from campaign to campaign. Seriously, I’ve never seen so many different ways to look at the same numbers.
Every company’s different, and every manager wants to see different stats in different ways.
So we thought, “instead of forcing people to click into each and every campaign to gather their stats for an excel file, and instead of trying to come up with every conceivable graph that people might want, why not just barf out all their stats at once?”
Have you tried your B.A.R.F. download yet?
[...] For example, you can even calculate the best day to send emails based on your previous campaign open… [...]
[...] after your first few dozen emails. Writing effective subject lines, doing A/B testing, finding your best day to send—that stuff just comes naturally over [...]
Is that information still available? I can only find the time of day report and the very basic Excel spreadsheet. Has the linked moved?
It appears the link is now a big orange button on that page called “Compare Campaigns”
Hi there, I’ve got the following question. All our campaigns are sent with an A/B test 1 day earlier to 20-30% of the subscribers. Does that mean that the “Send Weekday” column shows only the day when the A/B test campaign has been sent?
FYI for future visitors to this page: The “download reports to excel” button in the image at the top of this post now reads “Compare All Campaigns”. It’s not orange anymore either as described in comments by Brandon Setter