A churn rate is the percentage of people who have left a group in a given period of time, so an email churn rate is the number of clients who have left an email list during the observed period, be that a month, a quarter, or a year.
It costs significantly more resources (time, energy, money) to seek out new clients than it does to retain existing ones. That’s why identifying your churn rate and roots is so important to the success of your marketing campaign.
You can calculate your churn rate simply by selecting a time period (we will use one year as an example) and using the formula:
(Subscribers at beginning of the year – subscribers at end of year) / (total number of subscribers at beginning of the year) X 100 = Churn rate
Let’s use an example. Anne is running a dietary blog and she starts the year with 500 subscribers. She ends the year with 478 subscribers. Her churn rate is then:
(500 – 478) / 500 X 100 = 4.4%
You can also dig a little more in depth into your churn rate in order to help yourself identify areas where churn can be avoided in the future by calculating:
([unsubscribes + soft bounces + hard bounces + spam] + [complaints + inactive subscribers])) / (total subscribers at beginning of the year) X 100 = Churn rate
Let’s take the same example but break down Anne’s client loss. She had 10 unsubscribe, 1 soft bounce, 2 hard bounces, no spam, no complaints, and 9 inactive subscribers. Her formula would now look like:
([10+1+2] + [9]) / 500 X 100 = 4.4%
The two categories in brackets within this formula represent two different types of churn.