Unsubscribe Rates: What’s Healthy for Your Email Campaigns?

Every metric of your marketing campaigns is predictable and important. Whether it is the open rate, click rate, click-through rate, or unsubscribe rate, all of them help you optimise your marketing strategy.

Today, we will talk about email unsubscribe rates. What is a good unsubscribe rate industry-wise, and how can you leverage this?

Let's get started!

What is an ideal unsubscribe rate?

An unsubscribing rate is the percentage of users who have opted out of your email marketing campaigns. Please note that this doesn't tell you the number but still helps you understand what number of users consider your emails irrelevant.

You don't have to worry unless the unsubscribe rate is less than 0.5%, which is the average unsubscribe rate. This means you have a clean email list or a healthy subscriber list.

Let's understand how to calculate the unsubscribe rate:

Unsubscribe Rate = (Number of Delivered Emails/Number of Unsubscribes)×100

Determine the Number of Unsubscribes: This is the number of people who unsubscribed from your email list after receiving the email campaign.

Determine the Number of Delivered Emails: This is the total number of emails that were successfully delivered to your recipients. It does not include emails that bounced or were otherwise undeliverable.

Example:

Suppose you sent out an email campaign and have the following data:

Number of unsubscribers: 50

Number of Delivered Emails: 10,000

Using the formula:

Unsubscribe Rate=(50/10000)×100

Unsubscribe Rate=0.005×100

Unsubscribe Rate=0.5%

So, the unsubscribe rate for this campaign would be 0.5%.

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As per the Campaign Monitor, the unsubscribe rate falls between 0.2% and 0.4% for different industries, as mentioned in the table below:

| Industry | Unsubscribe rates | |------------------------------------------|-------------------|
| Advertising & Marketing | 0.2 %| | Agriculture, Forestry, Fishing, Hunting | 0.3% |
| Consumer Packaged Goods | 0.1% | Education | 0.2% |
| Financial Services | 0.2% |
| Restaurant, Food & Beverage | 0.1% |
| Government & Politics | 0.1% |
| Healthcare Services | 0.3% |
| IT/Tech/Software | 0.2% |
| Logistics & Wholesale | 0.3% |
| Media, Entertainment, and Publishing | 0.1% | Nonprofit | 0.2% |
| Other | 0.3% |
| Professional Services | 0.2% |
| Real Estate, Design, Construction | 0.2% |
| Retail | 0.1% |
| Travel, Hospitality, and Leisure | 0.2% | Wellness and Fitness | 0.4% | Average Totals | 0.1% |

This table focuses on the unsubscribe rates across different industries, highlighting areas where email retention strategies might need adjustment.

How does an unsubscribe rate benefit you?

Well, apart from telling you that you have a healthy email subscriber list, it helps you:

1. Monitor Trends: It's useful to monitor unsubscribe rates over time to identify trends or issues with your email content or frequency.

2. Benchmarking: Compare your unsubscribe rates to industry benchmarks to see how your campaigns perform relative to others.

3. Content Quality: High unsubscribe rates may indicate that your content is not resonating with your audience, prompting a review and adjustment of your email strategy.

4. Segmentation: Consider segmenting your email list to target more relevant content to specific groups, which can help reduce unsubscribe rates.

By regularly calculating and analysing your unsubscribe rate, you can gain valuable insights into the effectiveness of your email campaigns and make data-driven decisions to improve engagement.

What to do if the unsubscribe rate is higher than the average industry rate?

If your unsubscribe rate is higher than the industry average, here's what you can do:

1. Improve Content Quality: Make sure your emails are relevant and interesting to your audience.

2. Optimise Frequency: Don’t send too many emails. Find a balance that works for your subscribers.

3. Enhance Subscriber Experience: Ensure emails look good on mobile and make unsubscribing easy.

4. Get Feedback: Ask unsubscribers why they’re leaving and use this info to improve.

5. Segment and Clean Your List: Send targeted emails to specific groups and remove inactive subscribers.

6. Test and Optimise: Try different subject lines, and content, and send times to see what works best.

7. Offer Value: Include helpful information, not just promotions, and offer exclusive content or discounts.

By making these adjustments, you can reduce your unsubscribe rate and keep your audience engaged.

What are the other metrics for a club with an unsubscribe rate?

To fully understand your email campaign performance, consider key metrics like open rate, click-through rate (CTR), click-to-open rate (CTOR), conversion rate, and bounce rate. These metrics indicate subject line effectiveness, content engagement, action-driven content, campaign success, and email deliverability.

Further, using a messaging tool like Advantus can help you better optimise and analyse these metrics, improving your email marketing strategy.

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