Is Your Email Unsubscribe Rate Too High?
By Anna Johnson on February 10th, 2010One measure of how targeted, relevant and valued are the emails you send to your email list is your unsubscribe rate – the percentage of email subscribers that unsubscribe from your list.
Unsubscribes per se are not a bad thing. In fact, it’s generally good when people pro-actively unsubscribe from your list because it means you are eliminating email recipients who just aren’t interested in what you have to say. Your email open rate and click-through rate (CTR) will be higher as a result.
Actually it’s the uninterested subscribers who DON’T unsubscribe that cause your open rate and CTR to be understated. That’s why you should periodically clean your list by removing subscribers who don’t, after a certain period of time, respond in any way to your emails (i.e. they don’t open emails, click on links, or buy from you).
Nonetheless, a higher than industry-average unsubscribe rate could also reflect discontent with the quality of your emails. So keep an eye on the TREND in your unsubscribe rate. If it rises (or drops) sharply then that’s reason to assess the quality of your emails and/or list.
So what is a satisfactory unsubscribe rate? Here are the average unsubscribe rates from Silverpop’s 2009 analysis of 7,000 emails sent by email marketers across a variety of industries and countries.
Unsubscribe Rate:
- Average 0.21 percent
- Median 0.09 percent
- Top Quartile 0.01 percent
- Bottom Quartile 0.26 percent
Source: Silverpop, “International Email Marketing Metrics Benchmark Study,” July 2009
January 8th, 2012 at 10:09 pm
Those values sound way off for the typical email campaign. 0.21 percent is way too good for an average unsub rate, and chances are the campaigns represented in this study just had extremely loyal customers that don’t represent the typical customer well. I would bet the average among all campaigns is more likely around at least 1%, and other studies seem to suggest this to be a more likely value.