[FAQ]

Hi everyone,

I’m the email specialist for a B2B company in London, and I’m putting together my monthly performance report.

Our unsubscribe rate per campaign is generally hovering around the 0.4% mark. I’m not really sure if this is a good, bad, or average number. I’m looking for some industry benchmarks to understand our performance better.

More importantly, I want to figure out why people are unsubscribing. Is there a standard way to get feedback from people who are leaving the list? I want to get some actionable insights from the data, not just report the number.

Any advice would be much appreciated. Cheers.

[Jeff Bullas]

A great question. Unsubscribes aren’t just a loss; they are a valuable source of feedback.

Short Answer: A healthy unsubscribe rate for an email campaign is generally considered to be below 0.5%. To analyze the reasons, you must implement an exit survey on your unsubscribe page that asks users for specific, text-based feedback on why they are leaving.

The goal is to treat unsubscribes as a data point to learn from, not just a negative metric to be feared.

As a general benchmark, an unsubscribe rate of under 0.5% per email is considered healthy for most industries. If your rate is significantly higher, it’s a strong signal that there is a mismatch between what your audience expects and what you are sending. It is also worth noting that you should expect temporary spikes in unsubscribes if you email a segment of your list that has been inactive for a long time. An unusually low rate, like 0.1%, can sometimes be a red flag that your unsubscribe link is too difficult to find.

The only effective way to analyse the reasons for unsubscribes is to ask for feedback at the moment someone leaves. The best practice is to configure your unsubscribe link to lead to a simple landing page with an optional, one-question exit survey. This page should first confirm that they have been successfully unsubscribed, and then ask, “Could you tell us why you’re leaving?”.

Provide a few clear, multiple-choice options in your survey. Common reasons include “I receive too many emails,” which is feedback on your sending frequency, or “The content is no longer relevant to me,” which is feedback on your content and segmentation strategy. You should also include an open text field for “Other” to capture more specific feedback. Analysing this text-based data over time will give you incredibly valuable, direct insight into how you can improve your email program for your remaining subscribers.

Most importantly, never make the unsubscribe process difficult. Hiding the link or forcing users to log in is against email regulations and will only result in them hitting the spam button, which is far more damaging to your sender reputation.

Cheers,
Jeff

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