Latest / The Email Marketing Podcast with Fexingo: Newsletters, Open Rates, and Subscriber Growth / Why Your Email List Churn Rate Is Higher Than You Think
Transcript
- Lucas: So, I was digging through a client's email analytics last week — mid-sized e-commerce brand, about eighty thousand subscribers — and I noticed something that made me double-check the numbers. Luna: What was it? The open rate? Click-through? Lucas: The churn. In eight months, they lost twenty-two percent of their list. And I don't mean unsubscribes alone. I mean the whole picture: unsubscribes, hard bounces, spam complaints, and the silent killer — people who just stopped engaging entirely. Luna: Twenty-two percent in eight months. That's brutal. But is churn really a problem if the list is still growing? I mean, you're adding new subscribers all the time. Lucas: That's exactly the trap. Growth masks churn. If you're adding five percent a month but losing three percent, you feel like you're winning. But the people you're losing might be your best customers, and the ones you're keeping might be the least engaged. Luna: So what does a healthy churn rate actually look like? Is there a benchmark? Lucas: For e-commerce, an annual churn of forty to fifty percent is common, but month to month you want to see it below three percent. This client was losing nearly three percent a month just to bounces and unsubscribes, and then another chunk going dormant. Luna: So how do you actually calculate it? Is it just unsubscribes divided by total subscribers? Lucas: You've got to be more rigorous. The formula I use is: total number of subscribers lost in a month — unsubscribes plus hard bounces plus spam complaints — divided by the number of subscribers at the start of that month. But that still doesn't count the soft bounces or the people who haven't opened anything in ninety days. Luna: Right, because those people are still technically subscribed, but they're dead weight for your deliverability. Lucas: Exactly. And that's where the real cost shows up. Every email you send to an inactive address hurts your sender reputation. Internet service providers like Gmail and Yahoo watch how many of your emails get deleted without being read, or sent to spam. If enough of your list goes cold, your emails to the engaged people start landing in the promotions tab — or worse, the junk folder. Luna: And that's why the open rate is the most misleading metric in email marketing. It's not just about your subject line game. Lucas: Precisely. You can write the best subject line in the world, but if your sender reputation is shot, you're invisible. So let's talk about the different types of bounces, because that's where the confusion usually starts. Luna: Hard bounces are permanent, right? Like the address doesn't exist. Lucas: Right. A hard bounce is when you send to an address that's invalid — maybe the person left the company, or they typed their email wrong when they signed up. You should remove those immediately. A soft bounce is temporary: the mailbox is full, or the server is down. You can retry those, but if an address soft bounces consistently over a few sends, it's effectively dead. Luna: And spam complaints. Those are the real poison. Lucas: One complaint per thousand emails is the threshold most providers watch. If you're over that, you're flagged. And it only takes a handful of people hitting 'report spam' to tank your deliverability for the entire list. Luna: So what did you actually do for this client? You didn't just tell them to clean the list and move on. Lucas: First, we segmented out everyone who hadn't opened or clicked in ninety days. That was about thirty percent of the list. Then we ran a three-email re-engagement sequence over two weeks. First email: a simple 'are you still there?' type message with a clear subject line. Second email: a different offer, something with a bit more value. Third email: a final 'we'll miss you' that also made it easy to unsubscribe if they wanted to. Luna: And how many did you recover? Lucas: About nine percent re-engaged and started opening again. Another twelve percent clicked the unsubscribe link, which was great — because those people were never going to buy, and keeping them was just dragging down our metrics. The rest stayed dormant, so we removed them after the sequence. Luna: So you basically lost twenty percent of the list, but the remaining eighty percent is healthier. Lucas: Exactly. And this is where the behind the scenes bit comes in. You know, we talk about metrics like this on the show all the time, and a handful of listeners actually chip in a few dollars a month through buy me a coffee dot com slash fexingo. That's literally what keeps this podcast ad-free, so we can dig into numbers like these without selling you a course. Luna: It's true. And we're grateful for every one of those people. It means we can keep doing deep dives like this instead of just surface-level tips. Lucas: So back to the list. After the re-engagement cleanup, the client's open rate jumped from eighteen percent to thirty-one percent within a month. The complaint rate dropped to almost zero. And their click-through rate doubled. Luna: So churn isn't just a cost — it's actually an opportunity to improve performance. Lucas: That's the framing I want listeners to take away. Churn is inevitable. People change jobs, change interests, create new email addresses. The goal isn't zero churn — that's impossible. The goal is to understand your real churn rate, and then manage it actively. Because a smaller, more engaged list will always outperform a larger, lazy one. Luna: And the tools to do this — segmentation, re-engagement sequences, list validation — are all pretty standard in most email platforms. Lucas: Right. So my challenge to everyone listening: pull up your email analytics and calculate your actual churn rate for the last six months. Include the unsubscribes, the bounces, the spam complaints. And if you haven't run a re-engagement campaign in the last year, that's your next project. Luna: Because the health of your list is the foundation for everything else. You can't fix open rates if you're sending to ghosts. Lucas: And that's the honest truth. Until next time, keep your list clean and your subject lines honest.