The share of delivered emails that led the recipient to unsubscribe. It is the clearest direct signal that your emails are too frequent or not relevant to some people.
Formula
Unsubscribe rate = unsubscribes ÷ emails delivered × 100
Example
Meera's email is delivered to 8,000 subscribers and 40 people unsubscribe. Unsubscribe rate = 40 ÷ 8,000 = 0.5%.
How you'll hear it
“Unsubscribes doubled after we went to daily emails; the extra sales aren't worth losing the list.”
What it helps you decide
How often to email, which segments to email less, and whether to offer a 'fewer emails' option instead of all-or-nothing.
Where people misread it
A rate per email can look small while the monthly loss is large, because it repeats with every send. A very low rate can also mean the unsubscribe link is hard to find, which tends to push people to the spam button instead.
The story
Meera moves from 4 emails a month to 12, hoping to sell more.
| Delivered per email | 8,000 |
| Unsubscribe rate per email | 0.5% |
| Unsubscribes per email | 40 |
| Unsubscribes in the month | 160 |
|---|
| Delivered per email | 8,000 |
| Unsubscribe rate per email | 0.8% |
| Unsubscribes per email | 64 |
| Unsubscribes in the month | 768 |
|---|
The number looks right. Sales her email tool attributes to email rise from ₹60,000 to ₹75,000 a month, +₹15,000, and 0.8% per email still sounds small.
What it hides. She loses 768 subscribers in a month instead of 160, which is 9.6% of the list. Those are people she can no longer reach for Diwali or the wedding season, and some who stay begin to ignore her.
What to look at instead. Monthly unsubscribes against monthly list growth, and sales per email, not just total sales: ₹15,000 per email at 4 a month, ₹6,250 at 12. She settles on 8 emails a month, with daily emails only to people who clicked in the last 30 days.
All figures are fictional and illustrative. For simplicity each email is assumed to reach 8,000 people; in practice the list shrinks as people leave.
Work out your unsubscribe rate and monthly loss
The example's numbers are filled in. Replace them with yours.
Compare the monthly loss with how many new subscribers you add each month.
Don't confuse it with
- Spam complaint rate: people who marked the email as spam, which does more damage than an unsubscribe.
- Churn rate: customers who stopped buying, not subscribers who stopped reading.
Related terms
Sources
- Email Marketing Benchmarks & Industry Statistics, Mailchimp (Intuit), 2023
- Email sender guidelines, Google (Gmail Help)