What is churn rate?
As it relates to email marketing, churn refers to the percentage of people unsubscribing or being removed from your list every week, month, quarter, or year (depending on how you track it).
Churn is also used to describe, in business, the percentage of people that stop paying for a subscription-based product. But it’s important to differentiate, here, that we’re strictly talking about email subscribers, whether those people are paying customers or not.
Here’s the formula you can use to track your email list churn.
Churn Rate = (Subscribers at Beginning of Period – Subscribers at End of Period)/Subscribers at Beginning of Period
For example…
9% = (1,000 – 900)/1,000
Why is churn rate important?
As an email marketer, churn rate is important to understand so that you know how many people are leaving (or being removed from) your email list. This helps you understand whether or not your content is resonating with your audience, which then allows to test and improve your email marketing efforts.
Ideally, you’ll set benchmarks for your email list’s churn rate and then you’ll try to decrease that churn rate by producing better content, emailing at the best time of day, and even by using re-engagement email campaigns.
How to decrease churn rate?
Ultimately, the best way to decrease churn rate is to set benchmarks, test the kind of content your audience wants to receive, and iterate based on what you learn. But of course, that’s easier said than done. So here are a few resources you can use to learn more about decreasing your churn rate and keeping people on your email list longer.
- Top 7 Heavenly Ways to Reduce Email List Churn Rate
- Email Marketing List Churn: The Silent Campaign Killer
- The one email that decreased Moz’s churn rate by 40% [Case Study!]
To fully understand churn rate, though, you must understand two other important metrics/terms:
- Retention Rate
- List Fatigue