We’ve had a powerful but “hidden” feature for a number of years that makes it exceedingly simple to track the individual orders generated by a MailChimp campaign. The feature, called eCommerce360, lets you track customers as they click through from the MailChimp campaign to your site, and then passes back their order information back to MailChimp at checkout.

Once you know what your readers are purchasing, you can create targeted campaigns or helpful, follow-up drip campaigns. eCommerce360 lets your group your readers by purchases, so you can send a special offer to those readers who have spent the most money on your site. Or maybe you might want to send a coupon to those folks that purchased in the past but haven’t been back in a while.

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I got some nice feedback when I posted about our new revenue charts. So I thought I’d post some more tips for e-commerce marketers. First, go install our eCommerce360 feature. It connects MailChimp to e-commerce carts like Shopify, Magento, MivaMerchant, osCommerce, and more. Life won’t be the same after you install that. At the very least, connect your Google Analytics account to MailChimp. Then, you can go beyond simple open and click tracking, and get stats like this:

Done? Cool, now we can actually connect user behavior (like purchase activity) with your email marketing.

The Chivery is a website that sells funny t-shirts, and they were kind enough to let me use their account as an example here. These are just some quick ideas I had while skimming through their MailChimp account. Hopefully you’ll find this useful too.

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In MailChimp v7.5, we launched a new feature under the Reports screen: The Revenue Chart. Here’s how that came to be, and why it’s useful.

I was talking to a customer a few months ago. He sells stuff online, and he tells me that his email newsletters are his biggest revenue driver. Every time he sends a campaign, he makes several thousand dollars. He was particularly proud of his consistently high open rate, and he asked if I had any advice for improving it. So I looked at his campaign stats under the “Reports” tab:

The first thing I noticed was that August 1st campaign in the screenshot. “Whoah, what happened there?!?” At first glance, it looks like his worst-ever campaign, because his open rate plummeted from the 40s (which is amazing when you look at industry standards) down to the low teens. Yikes. Was it his subject line? Did he send the email on a non-optimal day? Why’d it suck so bad? I was just about to tell him “Whatever you did on that day, don’t ever do it again.” But I looked more closely at the campaign stats, and I’m so glad I didn’t give him that horrible advice.

Turns out it was actually an extremely successful campaign…

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We’re preparing to launch some new features in MailChimp, putting us at v7.5 (for those keeping track). The features will start to go live next week and will take a few days to propagate to all two million user accounts (August 20-24).

Here’s what’s new:

• We’re slimming down the Campaign Builder navigation, to make some room for a totally new editor down the road
• E-Commerce data gets a big revamp
• Code editor gets some tweaks

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Brian Getting of Terra Firma Design has created the most awesome Shopify plugin logo ever. Or, if you’re me, the most frightening MailChimp plugin logo ever.

Either way, the logo also comes with an actual plugin that integrates MailChimp with your Shopify site. The plugin is called Chimpified, and it automatically adds customers to your MailChimp list, keeps unsubs synced across both platforms, and it takes advantage of our extremely powerful Ecommerce360 plugin to track sales and measure the ROI generated by your email campaigns.

If you’re a Shopify user, go check it out at chimpified.com