Email Marketing Term
What is Unsubscribe Rate?
The percentage of recipients who opt out of receiving future emails after a campaign.
Unsubscribe rate indicates list fatigue or content relevance issues. It's calculated: (Unsubscribes ÷ Emails Delivered) × 100.
A healthy unsubscribe rate is under 0.5% per campaign. Rates above 1% signal problems - too frequent emails, irrelevant content, or poor list acquisition.
Some unsubscribes are healthy - they clean your list of unengaged recipients. However, consistently high rates damage deliverability and indicate strategic issues.
Examples
- 50 unsubscribes from 10,000 emails = 0.5% unsubscribe rate
- Promotional emails see higher unsubscribe rates than transactional
- Rates spike after frequency increases
Tips for Unsubscribe Rate
- ✓Make unsubscribe easy - hidden links cause spam complaints
- ✓Offer frequency preferences instead of full unsubscribe
- ✓Survey unsubscribers to understand why
- ✓Monitor unsubscribe rate by email type
Related Terms
List Hygiene
The practice of regularly cleaning your email list by removing invalid, inactive, or unengaged subscribers.
Email Frequency
How often you send emails to your subscribers - daily, weekly, monthly, etc.
Engagement Rate
A composite metric measuring how actively subscribers interact with your emails through opens, clicks, and other actions.
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