Performance data from Mailchimp
Better Email can show how the emails you build actually perform after they are sent from Mailchimp: sends, deliveries, opens, clicks, bounces, unsubscribes, abuse reports, top clicked links, and how engagement develops in the first day after a send.
This guide covers how to switch it on. It assumes you have already connected Mailchimp to Better Email.
For what the finished result looks like and how to read it, see Campaign performance.
Your contact data stays in Mailchimp
Before anything else, the most important thing to know:
Better Email never receives, processes, or stores contact-level data. No email addresses, no contact IDs, no per-recipient activity.
Better Email reads Mailchimp's campaign reports, which return campaign-level totals — counts, link URLs, and send metadata such as subject lines. The per-contact activity behind those totals stays in your Mailchimp account.
Nothing to set up inside Mailchimp
Mailchimp's reports already hold every number Better Email shows, so there is no aggregation job to install and no extra permission to grant. The connection you made for exporting is enough.
Enable performance data in Better Email
- Open your Mailchimp integration in Better Email.
- Turn on
Sync performance data. - Save the integration.
Better Email refreshes performance data about once an hour.
How campaigns are matched
Better Email matches a Mailchimp campaign to the campaign you built by name: the Mailchimp campaign's title (the internal name shown in the campaign list, not the subject line) is compared with the name of the Better Email campaign that was exported to that integration.
If you let Better Email create the campaign in Mailchimp the title matches by construction. If someone builds the campaign in Mailchimp from the exported template, keep the campaign title the same as the Better Email campaign name.
With several Destinations, each Destination only sees the sends of its own audience, and of its own segment when it names one, so a campaign exported through one Destination is matched against campaigns sent to that Destination's audience.
Good to know
- Performance data covers sends from the last 30 days at the time the feature is enabled, and keeps history for everything synced after that.
- Metrics for a send keep refreshing while it is inside that 30-day window, so opens and clicks that arrive days after a send are still counted.
- The engagement timeline covers the first 24 hours after each send, in 3-hour intervals. Mailchimp only reports an hourly breakdown for the first day.
- Delivered is sends minus bounces, which is the same denominator Mailchimp uses for its own rates.
- Opens include opens from email clients that fetch images in the background, matching the unique opens Mailchimp shows in its own reports.
- Campaigns only. Emails sent by Mailchimp automations are not included.
Troubleshooting
No performance data at all. Check that Sync performance data is enabled on the integration and that the integration is still connected. If Better Email was removed inside Mailchimp, the integration shows the reason; click Reconnect on the integration and the next sync picks it up.
A sent campaign shows no performance at all. The Mailchimp campaign's title probably differs from the Better Email campaign's name — see How campaigns are matched.
Numbers differ slightly from Mailchimp's own reports. Opens and clicks keep accruing after a send, and the two systems refresh at different moments. Better Email refreshes hourly. Metrics for a send stop updating 30 days after it was sent.