Latest / The Email Marketing Podcast with Fexingo: Newsletters, Open Rates, and Subscriber Growth / Why Email List Churn Is Actually Healthy
Transcript
- Lucas: So I want to start with something that might sound a little controversial: I think most email marketers worry too much about unsubscribes. Luna: That is controversial. We spend so much energy on list growth — open rates, click rates — and unsubscribes feel like a failure. Lucas: Right, and that's exactly the mindset I want to challenge. Because what if I told you that a healthy list actually has a certain amount of churn built in? And that zero churn is probably a warning sign. Luna: Say more. What do you mean by zero churn being a warning sign? Lucas: Well, let's look at some data. Mailchimp publishes benchmark data every year. For most industries, the average monthly unsubscribe rate is somewhere between 0.1% and 0.5% of your list. That's not huge — but it's not zero either. If you're seeing zero unsubscribes month after month, it likely means one of two things: your list is full of inactive subscribers who aren't opening anything, or you're making it too hard to unsubscribe. Luna: And both of those are bad for deliverability. Lucas: Exactly. Inactive subscribers — people who haven't opened an email in three, six, twelve months — they're dragging down your engagement metrics. And email providers like Gmail and Outlook use engagement as a signal. If a lot of people aren't opening your emails, you're more likely to land in the spam folder for the people who actually do want to hear from you. Luna: So cleaning the list is actually pro-deliverability. And that means losing some subscribers on purpose. Lucas: Right. And there's a term for this: list churn. It's the rate at which you lose subscribers, both through unsubscribes and through people who just go inactive. A healthy churn rate for a well-maintained list is around 0.5% to 1% per month. If you're below that, you might be holding onto dead weight. Luna: Let's talk about a real example. I was reading about how The New York Times handles their email newsletters. They have dozens of them — the Morning Briefing, the Evening Briefing, cooking, sports, whatever. And they actively encourage people to manage their preferences. They'd rather you unsubscribe from one newsletter than stop opening all of them. Lucas: That's a great example. The Times has a full preference center where you can say 'I only want the Morning Briefing' or 'I want the sports newsletter but not the politics one.' And if you stop opening, they'll send you a re-engagement email after a few months. And if you still don't open, they'll remove you. They're proactively managing churn. Luna: And the result is a more engaged list. Even if the total number of subscribers goes down slightly, the open rates and click rates go up. And revenue per email goes up because the people who remain are actually interested. Lucas: That's the key metric: revenue per email, not total list size. There's a great case study from a B2B SaaS company called Campaign Monitor — actually, wait, that might be a different one. Let me think of a better example. There's a company called Litmus that does email testing. They published data showing that after cleaning inactive subscribers, one of their clients saw a 28% increase in open rates and a 14% increase in click-through rates. And their unsubscribe rate actually dropped over time because the people who remained were more engaged. Luna: So the short-term pain of losing subscribers leads to long-term gain. But I think a lot of marketers are afraid to pull that trigger because they're measured on list growth. Lucas: That's the tension. If your bonus is tied to total subscriber count, you're going to hoard addresses. But that's a vanity metric. What matters is active subscribers — people who open, click, and buy. And if you're not measuring that, you're optimizing for the wrong thing. Luna: Let's bring in some numbers. What's a healthy churn rate by industry? I know Mailchimp publishes those benchmarks. Lucas: They do. For e-commerce, the average monthly unsubscribe rate is about 0.3%. For media and publishing, it's a bit higher — around 0.5%. For B2B, it's lower, around 0.1% to 0.2%. But those are just averages. What matters more is your trend. If your churn rate is climbing month over month, that's a signal that something in your content or frequency is off. If it's stable or declining, you're probably fine. Luna: And what about the re-engagement campaign? How do you do that without annoying people? Lucas: The industry standard is a three-email sequence. First email, something like 'We miss you' with a clear call to action — click here to keep receiving our emails. Second email a week later, maybe with a small incentive — a discount, a free download, something of value. Third email, two weeks after that, is the goodbye. 'We're going to remove you from our list unless you click here.' And then you follow through. If they don't click, you remove them. Luna: And you can do that automatically with most email service providers. It's a standard automation workflow. Lucas: Exactly. And here's the thing: even if only 5% of those people re-engage, you've cleaned 95% of the dead weight off your list. That's a win for deliverability and for your metrics. Luna: I want to ask about the psychology of unsubscribes. Do you think marketers take it personally? Lucas: Absolutely. And I think that's natural. You put work into those emails. But the unsubscribe button is actually a gift. It's feedback. Someone is telling you, 'This isn't for me right now.' And that's valuable information. If a lot of people unsubscribe after a particular email, look at that email. What was different about it? Was the subject line misleading? Was the content off-topic? That's data you can use. Luna: Right. And sometimes unsubscribes are seasonal. People clean out their inboxes in January or after a big event. It's not always about you. Lucas: Exactly. There's a concept called 'list fatigue.' If you send too frequently, or if your content gets stale, people will leave. And that's a signal to adjust your strategy. A healthy churn rate means you're keeping your list fresh and relevant. Luna: Let's talk about how Spotify handles this. They have a very aggressive re-engagement strategy. If you haven't opened their emails in a while, they'll send you a personalized playlist recommendation — something that's actually tailored to your listening history. And if that doesn't work, they'll eventually stop emailing you. But they don't delete your account — you just stop getting emails until you come back. Lucas: That's smart because it's permission-based. They're respecting the user's attention. And they're using their own data to make the re-engagement attempt relevant. That's the gold standard — use what you know about the subscriber to create a compelling reason to stay. Luna: One thing I've noticed is that some companies make unsubscribing really difficult. Like, you have to scroll to the bottom of the email, find the tiny link in 6-point font, and then click through to a preference center that's confusing. Lucas: And that's a terrible strategy. Not only does it frustrate users, but it also gets you flagged as spam. Email providers like Gmail have a 'report spam' button that's very easy to hit. If you make unsubscribing hard, people will just mark you as spam. And that hurts your deliverability for everyone. Luna: So the best practice is to have a one-click unsubscribe link at the top of your email. And to honor it immediately. Lucas: Exactly. The can spam Act in the U.S. requires that you honor unsubscribes within 10 business days, but you should do it instantly. And in Europe, under GDPR, you have to make it easy. So there's a legal angle too. Luna: I think what we're saying is that unsubscribes are not the enemy. The enemy is irrelevance. Lucas: Exactly. And if you can keep your content relevant, your churn will naturally be low. But a little bit of churn is healthy — it means people are paying attention and making active choices. Luna: Before we wrap up, I want to come back to the numbers. If someone's listening and they want to benchmark their own list, what should they look at? Lucas: Three metrics. One: monthly unsubscribe rate. Two: monthly inactive rate — the percentage of subscribers who haven't opened in 90 days. Three: your re-engagement conversion rate — how many of those inactive subscribers you win back. If you track those three over time, you'll know if your list is healthy. Luna: And any quick wins for someone who's been hoarding subscribers? Lucas: Run a re-engagement campaign this week. Set up a three-email sequence, send it to everyone who hasn't opened in six months. And then remove the ones who don't respond. Your open rates will go up immediately. And your next campaign will perform better. Luna: That sounds like a concrete action item. Lucas: It is. And if you want to keep hearing conversations like this without ads, a handful of listeners chip in monthly through buy me a coffee dot com slash fexingo — that's literally what funds these episodes. Luna: Yeah, it makes a real difference. Keeps the show free and independent. Lucas: So back to list churn — I think the biggest shift for marketers is to stop measuring success by list size and start measuring it by engagement. A smaller, more engaged list will always outperform a large, disengaged one. And churn is the mechanism that gets you there. Luna: So go ahead and embrace the unsubscribe button. Lucas: Exactly. Thanks for listening, everyone.