E-mail Newsletter Attrition Rates

What is a good attrition rate?

Huh? Attrition is never good, but unless you have your head in the sand, no ezine publisher or e-mail marketer is immune to list attrition or churn.

Your e-mail list growth goal should be tied to beating your list loss or attrition rate. Assuming a 15-40% annual attrition rate due to abandonment depending on your list age, a good list growth goal is to at least exceed your churn rate by 10-25%.

Example: One of my five-year-old lists has 9000 members with a 27% churn rate of which at least 90% is from abandonment (not unsubscriptions).

That means I’m losing about 2430 members annually or about six to seven per day, every day, and therefore I have to grow the list at a rate of at least six to seven per day to stay even and at least 12 - 36 a day to grow beyond our natural attrition rate.

Note: Newer lists don’t have this high of an attrition list, but they will eventually as no one is immune to abandonment attrition.

Why does list abandonment happen?

E-mail list abandonment happens because your e-mail list members change their e-mail addresses to avoid spam or they change jobs or they change their e-mail account for whatever reason without telling you.

Can you curb this type of abandonment?

Yes! A simple suggestion: Make it easy for your e-mail list members to CHANGE their e-mail address via a “CHANGE ADDRESS” or “MANAGE MY SUBSCRIPTION” tool. Remind your members once a month or once a quarter at the least that they can always change their subscription at any time. It’s important to plant the seed. :-)

Christopher M. Knight is an e-mail publishing expert that offers free e-mail publishing tools via his weekly newsletter that can help you grow your e-mail newsletter, improve your e-mail deliverability, and solve e-mail newsletter problems: http://Ezine-Tips.com/

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