Email churn rate is an email marketing metric that shows the percentage of people who unsubscribed from your newsletter or were otherwise removed from your mailing list over a certain period.
Whether it is a week, month, year, or any other period, you can track and calculate your email churn rate to see if the content of your email marketing campaigns is relevant for your subscribers or you should work on improving it.
There are two types of email churn: transparent churn and opaque churn. Here’s what makes them different:
Transparent churn (Voluntary churn) | Opaque churn (Involuntary churn) |
If someone unsubscribes from you intentionally, marks your emails as spam, or provides invalid email addresses resulting in hard bounces, they become a part of a transparent churn rate. | Opaque churn is the type of churn caused by subscribers who ignore your emails unintentionally. They might overlook it, be uninterested, or miss your email because it ended up in the spam folder. |
Just like with other important metrics, email marketing services usually provide email analytics tools that generate churn rate reports for you to track. However, you can calculate your email churn rate yourself using the formula below:
Let’s say, you want to calculate your churn rate in a month. If at the beginning of the month you had 1,000 subscribers, and had 930 by the end, your email churn rate equals:
(1000 – 930) / 1000 × 100 = 7%
On average, according to several sources, the churn rate for businesses is about 30% yearly. Though, the average transparent churn rate is typically higher than the opaque churn rate.
The email churn rate indicates how your email marketing campaigns perform. Here are some other reasons why you should track your email churn rate:
To reduce your email churn rate, identify the reasons why it might be high. Here are some of the typical causes of a high email churn rate:
As you’ve learned possible reasons for a high churn rate, it’s time to learn how to keep it as low as possible. Here, we’ve gathered a list of the best tips to reduce your churn rate:
In its email, Pho makes an exclusive offer for its subscribers. This campaign can promote the new menu and show appreciation to the brand’s subscribers at the same time. The email has a clear value and most likely will contribute to the retention rate, as the subscribers will look forward to other offers by the brand.
Let’s say, you enjoy hiking and often purchase necessary gear. Imagine you receive an email offering a selection of hiking boots with a discount. Would you engage with this email? Even if you are not planning on buying a new pair, you would probably still open and take a look at the offer. Now, imagine you regularly receive emails offering something of your particular interest. This would probably make you never consider unsubscribing from this newsletter.
The email below by FashionNova is a great example of personalized content. The brand offered a selection of items the subscriber was interested in and provided a promo code making the offer more desirable. Receiving this email the subscriber will consider taking the offer and look forward to other emails by the brand.
Since it may depend on various factors, such as your industry or your personal marketing goals, you can refer to your industry’s benchmarks or analyze your engagement metrics. We also recommend you plan your email campaigns beforehand to only send the campaigns with the most engagement potential. You can use an email marketing automation tool for this purpose.
In this retention email by Cuisinart, the brand targets a recipient who no longer wants to receive the brand’s campaigns. Rather than just saying bye to the unsubscriber, Cuisinart offers them to customize their preferences. By doing that, the brand shows consideration and appreciation. The email also features a fun wordplay and images making it more appealing.
In the email below, Lyft offers an Amazon gift card for participating in its survey. This offer would most likely not go unnoticed by the recipients, which increases engagement and makes the audience look forward to other valuable offers from the brand.
There are multiple re-engagement email options, such as exclusive discounts, promo codes, or other offers. You may also ask your customers for their feedback, ask a question they would want to answer, show them your consideration by checking on them, or show inactive subscribers what benefits they are missing.
This re-engagement email by Specialized Bicycle Components is not information-heavy but rather simple and straight to the point. The brand reminds the subscriber of the item they’ve been interested in and offers a discount increasing the chance of placing an order. Although the recipient may not do so, there is a high chance of engagement with the email.
Monitoring your email churn rate can bring multiple benefits to your business. Not only does it help with customer retention, sender reputation, and return on investment, but makes it easier to track the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns.
Don’t worry if your email churn rate is high though. Here’s what you can do to reduce it:
We hope our recommendations can help you keep your email churn rate low and make the best of your marketing campaigns.