About Mailchimp Attribution

Once you connect your online store to your Mailchimp audience, you can use Mailchimp to see how your marketing campaigns are affecting your sales. Mailchimp attribution links orders and sales to the last message your contacts interacted with. Use this information to discover which of your marketing emails and text messages are converted to sales.

In this article, you’ll learn about Mailchimp attribution and how it works.

Things to know

Here are some things to know about this feature.

• Mailchimp attribution is automatically compatible with all e-commerce integrations.
• If you’re planning to send SMS campaigns, you’ll need to activate SMS. Check out About SMS Marketing with Mailchimp to learn more.

Definitions

Here are some terms you’ll come across in this article.

Attribution
A method of assigning credits to the marketing email or text message that led to a sale.

Attribution window
The period of time that we track clicks for a marketing method like email or text.

Integrations
A link between your Mailchimp account and another account you own that lets you share information between the two accounts. For example, if you link your Shopify store with your Mailchimp account, your Shopify customers are added as contacts to your Mailchimp audience.

Last-touch attribution
A method of assigning attribution to the last marketing email or text message that a contact interacts with.

How it works

Mailchimp attribution tracks how your contacts interact with your marketing emails and text messages. It then assigns orders to the last message that your contacts have interacted with. No need to sign up or turn on anything. It's all set up for you, unless you want to customize your attribution windows.

By default, for emails, an order is attributable to a click if the order is placed within 30 days of the click. For text messages, we automatically attribute orders that happen within 5 days of a link click. You can customize these defaults on the Manage Integration page for your e-commerce app.

We track attributions using a last-touch model. If we see interactions across both email and text, the most recent interaction within the time window will get the credit. Find out more about attribution models.

Let’s say you’re using our default attribution settings. If your contact buys something within 30 days of clicking a link in your marketing email, we’ll attribute the order to that email.

Now, let’s say your contact doesn't buy anything after clicking a link from an email, but then clicks a link from a text message. If they make a purchase within 5 days, we’ll attribute the sale to the text message. If the purchase happens more than 5 days after the text message, but within 30 days of the email, we’ll attribute it to the email.

Manage Mailchimp attribution

You can customize your attribution settings to fit your specific needs.

To manage your attribution settings, follow these steps.

1. Click Analytics, and then choose Marketing dashboard.
2. Click Attribution settings.
3. Adjust your settings to fit your needs by clicking in the appropriate field and entering your new value. Settings that can be adjusted include:
   • Email clicked - Controls whether Mailchimp attribution considers email clicks within the specified window. You can enable or disable email clicks from being considered, or set the length of the window.
   • Email opened - Controls whether Mailchimp attribution takes email opens during the specified window into consideration. You can enable or disable email opens from being considered, or set the length of the window.
   • SMS clicked - Controls whether Mailchimp attribution considers text clicks within the specified window. You can enable or disable text clicks from being considered, or set the length of the window.
   • SMS delivered - Controls whether Mailchimp attribution considers text deliveries within the specified window. You can enable or disable text deliveries from being considered, or set the length of the window
4. Once you’ve completed your changes, click Save to finish.