Is a High Unsubscribe Rate Actually an Indicator of Awesome Emails?

Not sure what this “Stash” thing is? You probably missed last week’s post. Click here for a quick overview to get up to speed.

In this week’s Stash, we looked at the correlation between how many emails you send per guest per season and email performance like click, open, and unsubscribe rates. Rather than the typical rates (which are the first chart) we also tried something new by dividing those same numbers – clicks, opens, unsubscribers – by the size of the email database as well.

On the X-axis is the number of emails that resort sent per person that season. Here’s how they broke down:


Do you notice a trend? The more people act on an email, the more people act. If you get more opens, you typically get more clicks. If you get more clicks, you typically get more unsubscribes.

In other words, a high unsubscribe rate may not necessarily be a bad thing. Instead, it appears to be a by product of a really effective email.

To my feeble mind, this makes a lot of sense. For those of us with experience in direct sales, you know that as a pitch gets more aggresive two things will happen. First, you’ll get more sales. Second, the people that say “no” do so in harsher tones. The further you get from vanilla, the more people are going to react – for better or worse.

When You Should Care
In the past I’ve always been scared of high unsubscribe rates as if I’d done something wrong. The more I look at these numbers the more I think that may be exactly opposite of the truth. Should you totally ignore your unsubscribe rate? No, I’d first take some time to find your resort’s averages in each category. Then, by carefully watching your email stats you can identify red-flag emails that have below average open/click rates but above average unsubscribes.

The takeaway, however, is to not let a high unsubscribe rate rain on the parade of an email that performs well in other areas. A high unsubscribe rate seems to come with the territory of effective emails.

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For the full details from the Stash post I mentioned earlier, here’s the link:
http://www.ryansolutions.com/blog/2012/too-many-emails/