About Contact Ratings

Mailchimp rates each of your email marketing contacts on a scale of 1-5. Use this information to send an appreciation email to your most engaged contacts, or send a re-engagement email to try and win back contacts who haven't clicked a link in a while.

In this article, you'll learn how we determine contact ratings and what you can do with them.

To determine contact ratings, Mailchimp monitors regular and A/B testing emails only. Activity from ads, automations, and landing pages is not included.

How contact ratings work

Mailchimp uses a 16-point scale to measure contact engagement. To help you understand how a contact rates among others, we convert that number into a star rating. Every contact starts with a 0 engagement score, which is a 2-star rating.

To determine where contacts fall on the engagement scale, we measure their click activity against your send frequency. We recalculate contact ratings each time you send an email. It can help to think of this in terms of averages. For example, we'd rate a contact who doesn't click a link in a monthly email higher than we would rate a contact who doesn't click a link in a weekly email.

Here's an overview of what the star ratings mean.

Star Rating	Contact Activity
	This recipient has either unsubscribed and resubscribed, or soft bounced in the past.
	No engagement. This recipient is most likely a new contact, or a previously engaged contact who's gone dormant.
	Low engagement. This recipient clicks some links in your emails. They are either inconsistently engaged, or they haven't been in your audience long enough to have earned a higher rating.
	Moderate engagement. This recipient often clicks links in your emails.
	High engagement. This recipient consistently clicks links in your emails very consistently.

New contacts

All new contacts start out at a 2-star rating, which is a 0 on the engagement score scale. Contacts will earn a negative engagement score and lower their star rating if they've filed a complaint against you, or if their email address bounced. If they're unengaged and don't click links in your emails, their rating will likely stay at 2 stars.

Hard bounces and contact ratings

Bounced addresses normally result in a low contact rating. However, hard bounces aren't always accurate. If we see that a contact with a high contact rating hard bounced, we'll reset their engagement score to 0 but we won't immediately remove them from your audience.

About Bounces
Soft vs. Hard Bounces

What you can do with contact ratings

Contact ratings work like other contact data in your audience, so you can easily review it or create segments from these ratings. You can find contact ratings in your audience on the contact table. Use these scores to create segments of low-, medium-, or high-activity contacts, depending on who you're trying to engage.

About Subscriber Engagement
Getting Started with Segments

Example uses

Here are a few examples of how you can use contact ratings to segment your contacts.

Reward engaged contacts

Send a targeted email to your 4- and 5-star contacts that offers a promotion, discount, or other reward for their business. For example, offer free shipping or a discount on a popular product.

Re-engage inactive contacts

Most audiences have some contacts who aren't active and don't engage with emails. Target contacts with a low contact rating and invite them to re-engage with your brand. For example, send an exclusive offer or promote a contest or give-away.

Re-Engage Inactive Subscribers

Remove inactive contacts

If you've determined that your inactive contacts can't be re-engaged, you can use contact ratings to find and remove these contacts from your audience. This cuts down on your subscriber count, which could reduce your monthly bill.

Archive Inactive Subscribers