Last year, we witnessed big changes regarding data privacy and security regulations that impacted 84% of marketers, according to HubSpot research. To name a few: GDPR changes, Apple privacy protection features and new email marketing compliance rules.
These changes undoubtedly had a significant impact on email unsubscribe rate and deliverability and you may be feeling their effects now. But don't worry, as this article will provide you with proven ways to keep your unsubscribe rate low and keep your audience happy and engaged.
What is an email unsubscribe rate?
Email unsubscribe rate is one of the most important email marketing KPIs as it shows the percentage of people who opted out from your email list and decided they no longer want to receive emails.
It can help you determine the level of engagement and satisfaction of your subscribers, and whether they find your content relevant and valuable.
Also, if you notice that suddenly a lot of people unsubscribe, it could indicate some of the potential issues:
- You might be sending too many emails and being overwhelming
- Subscribers may not like your new design, branding or topics
- There might have been technical issues, such as broken links or not being mobile-responsive, that frustrated your audience
Finally, maybe it's not you – it could be them! Maybe some circumstances in your subscribers' lives changed, and your content is no longer relevant to them.
This can happen with businesses that offer one-time services, for example, the wedding industry. If your subscribers just got married, they may no longer feel the need to stay subscribed to your newsletter with wedding decoration tips.
But don't panic – we've got you covered. This article will provide proven ways to reduce email unsubscribe rates.
How to calculate email unsubscribe rate
Source: Freepik.com
Here's a simple formula to calculate the unsubscribe rate:
Unsubscribe rate = (Number of unsubscriber users / Total number of emails delivered) x 100
For example, if your email was delivered to 1000 email addresses and 5 people unsubscribed, you'd divide 5 by 1000 and then multiply the result by 100.
(5 / 1000) x 100 = 0.5
Your unsubscribe rate would be 0.5%, which is pretty good!
What is a good unsubscribe rate for email?
What's considered a good unsubscribe rate could vary depending on many factors such as your industry, demographics, size of your list but also the way you've collected email addresses.
People who buy email lists or use questionable lead magnets to get as many subscribers as possible can naturally expect a higher unsubscribe rate than those who have built their lists over time through quality content.
To answer the question, according to HubSpot, anything less than 1% can be considered a healthy unsubscribe rate, but you should try to keep it under that number.
How to reduce your email unsubscribe rate
Analyze your email list and campaigns
Did you know that there are ways to predict which people are the most likely to unsubscribe from your email list so that you can prevent it?
The best way to do so is to use a dedicated email analytics tool like SEINō that tracks more metrics than traditional email marketing tools or transactional email services you're using for sending your emails.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SmCl8fN3VF0
While most email marketing tools enable you to create customer segments based on their demographic and interests, we go the extra mile and provide a real-time dynamic segmentation based on user behavior and engagement.
For example, if someone who was previously engaging with your content suddenly stops opening your emails, we'll move them to the At-risk segment, meaning that you could potentially lose that subscriber. You can prevent that and try to re-engage them by sending them personalized emails or special offers and discounts.
Other metrics include seeing:
- Days since the last click
- Click frequency
- Days in the database
- Days between clicks
Many people discover that their unsubscribe rate is too high once it's too late to do anything about it because people already unsubscribed. With SEINō, you can avoid that scenario thanks to our real-time unsubscribe rate alerts.
They're very easy to set up: you can set a condition that you want to be notified if your unsubscribe rate (or any other metrics, like open rate, bounce rate or click-through rate) is higher or lower than a particular number. That way, you can first test-send your email campaign to one part of the audience, and if there are a lot of unsubscribes, you can optimize the campaign before you send it to other segments.
Follow our instructions to see how easy it is to create an alert:
Also, it's possible to benchmark and compare different email marketing campaigns in the same email marketing report so you can discover what elements triggered people to unsubscribe from some email campaigns more than others while also discovering elements that convert well and that you should stick to.
Here are some real-life examples of companies that improved their email marketing and increased campaign ROI with the help of SEINō:
- Glanbia: Glanbia is the largest sports supplement e-commerce platform that was struggling to analyze a large number of email campaigns every week. With SEINō, they finally gained access to real-time email tracking, providing them with a better way to measure email marketing success. This enabled them to benchmark and optimize campaigns faster than ever, saving them at least 16 hours per week.
- Temeer Group: We helped this fashion brand automate email campaign reports and integrate them with Google Analytics reports so they don't have to do it manually. As a result, they eliminated the need to use spreadsheets and saved tons of time that is now used to improve marketing and sales.
Include a double opt-in for new subscribers
Double opt-in is a proven way to keep your email unsubscribe rate low, as you're making sure that only people who are really interested get to subscribe to your content instead of people who might do it accidentally or without a lot of thinking.
Basically, all you have to do is ask your new subscribers for their email addresses and then send them an email where they have to confirm their subscription by clicking on a particular button. If they don't confirm within a certain time frame, they won't be added to your email list.
This process can easily be automated in all major email marketing tools.
Also, if you use gated content or incentivized signups as an email marketing strategy to grow your list, you should be careful, as many people subscribe just to get that lead magnet but may not want to receive further emails, leaving you with a high unsubscribe rate.
The goal is not only to attract subscribers, but to keep them and eventually convert them into paying customers.
Deliver on the promise to meet expectations
A welcome email serves to set expectations both in terms of the type of content your audience can expect and the frequency of your emails.
If you said you would send a weekly newsletter, stick to it. Do not spam your audience with daily emails, but also try to follow your schedule and be consistent.
This is important because if your audience hasn’t heard from you for months and then you pop up in their inboxes, many people could hit that unsubscribe button because they've forgotten that they've even subscribed to your list.
Create valuable and personalized content
Your content should be valuable and relevant to your audience and contain in-depth information that's not easy to find with only a few clicks.
In terms of personalization, the best way to do it is to divide your audience into different segments and send them only relevant content instead of overloading them with tons of information they may not be interested in.
You can create specific audiences based on demographics and user behavior or allow your subscribers to manage their own preferences. For example, if you have a platform for a healthy lifestyle, they should be able to choose whether they want to receive emails about diet, exercise, self-care or all of the above by ticking particular checkboxes.
Personalized offers are also one of the best ways to increase your email conversion rate and boost sales. If you've run out of inspiration, you can check out these email campaign ideas we've carefully selected for you.
Don’t spam
Everyone knows you should avoid spamming your subscribers with multiple emails a day, or you might trigger them to unsubscribe.
However, that's not the only thing, as internet service providers use many different filters and algorithms to classify something as spam.
Here are some suspicious behaviors that may flag your emails as spam:
- Higher volume of emails than usual or any significant change in your sending patterns
- Poorly formatted content, in terms of messy HTML or broken links
- Using spammy expressions such as free, buy now, special offer in subject lines
- High bounce rate, undeliverable emails
- Emails containing attachments or links to suspicious websites
If you want to learn more about this topic, check out these transactional email best practices.
However, if you're using SEINō, we'll notify you whenever we notice the slightest decrease in deliverability, so you can immediately fix it. Here's what it looks like:
Clean your email list
You’ve probably read dozens of email list management tips that suggested you had to clean your list every couple of months to remove people who haven’t opened some of your emails.
And you probably weren’t very happy about deleting subscribers. The good news is you don’t have to do that, as there is not much proof that supports that tip.
If anything – we’ve witnessed something different. We saw people coming back and engaging with emails after six months of inactivity or even longer, sometimes without any special incentive to win them back.
Circumstances and priorities change, and just because someone doesn’t have space to engage with your emails right now doesn’t mean they won’t purchase from you in the future when they need your product or service.
Remember that re-engagement campaigns shouldn’t be about making sales. Yes, you could offer some discount or a gift card – that’s always nice, but that shouldn’t be the main reason to reach out to your audience.
Instead, you should make it about genuine relationships, check up on them and offer them content that will resonate with them.
Finally, instead of focusing on creating advanced re-engagement campaigns, maybe you should ask yourself why those people stopped engaging in the first place. Maybe your content wasn’t relevant or interesting enough? And the solution could be to double down on making your regular content even more engaging!
This is not to say that you should never clean your list, even though it harms your sender reputation and deliverability.
Removing permanently undeliverable addresses is the right thing to do, as they won’t be able to engage with your emails either way.
Make sure the emails are responsive and user-friendly
When choosing email templates, opt for those that can adjust to every screen, whether it's desktop, mobile or tablet, because nothing ruins user experience more than emails that can't load properly.
Make sure they're user-friendly and easy to read by:
- Choosing a simple design and layout
- Using clear and large font
- Breaking down text into bite-sized paragraphs
- Adding enough headings and subheadings
Also, do not exaggerate with the number of pictures you add, as they can slow down the loading speed, which can be very frustrating.
If you want to learn more about the right formatting, check out these transactional email examples.
Ask for feedback
Asking for user feedback should become a regular part of your email campaign management.
Your audience knows best what kind of content they'd like to receive, and you should upfront ask them. Not to mention that email surveys can increase engagement and response rates, as users feel appreciated because their opinions matter.
You can ask them about their preferred topics and email frequency and even add some open-ended fields where they can suggest content they'd like to see.
Make it easy for people to unsubscribe
You should allow people to unsubscribe effortlessly by adding the unsubscribe button that's large enough and easy to spot. Email service providers tended to automatically add those buttons at the bottom of each email.
However, from February 2024, people who are sending more than 5000 emails a day are required to add a one-click unsubscribe link at the top of their emails, along with some other updates like authenticating your domain to increase security.
You can add a one-click unsubscribe by adding these headers to your emails:
- List-Unsubscribe-Post: List-Unsubscribe=One-Click
- List-Unsubscribe: <https://yourwebsite.com/unsubscribe/example>
In its new Email Sender Guidelines, Google also suggests automatically unsubscribing people with multiple bounced emails.
Conclusion
We hope these practical tips will help you not only lower your unsubscribe rate but also boost engagement and keep your email list happy and healthy.
If you want to dive deeper into email analytics and be notified whenever a subscriber stops engaging with your content so that you can prevent them from opting out, SEINō is the right tool for you.
It'll help you improve all your email metrics, including those most important, like the number of sales and revenue.
Schedule a free demo to see our features in action.
Email unsubscribe rate: FAQ
How do I calculate the email unsubscribe rate? You can calculate the unsubscribe rate by dividing the number of people who unsubscribed by the total number of emails that were delivered and then multiplying that result by 100 to get a percentage.
Why is my unsubscribe rate so high? Some of the most common reasons are sending irrelevant content, sending too many emails or having some technical issues in your emails.
Does the unsubscribe rate impact deliverability? Yes, high unsubscribe rates can affect your sender reputation and deliverability. They are a negative signal for internet service providers like Gmail and Yahoo that might classify your emails as spam.
What is the unsubscribe rate for B2B emails? The average unsubscribe rates in B2B email marketing vary from 0.10% to 0.31%, depending on the industry and time period, according to multiple studies.
