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PA at Wunderman
03 September 2010 10:28am
We are keen to understand what the industry average is for typical email churn from change of address/abandonment (as opposed to people simply choosing to unsubscribe). I've found the following article in the Media Post which suggests a third of subscribers will be lost annually but would be keen to hear from other sources which more directly quotes industry research.
http://www.mediapost.com/publications/?fa=Articles.showArticle&art_aid=77429
Any help is gratefully received
Director at Velo//
05 September 2010 23:43pm
Hi
Its a really difficult question to answer and in all the years I've been involved in email marketing, I haven't seen any industry wide stats.
This is mainly down to the fact that there are so many factors that can play a part such as the demographics of the audience. For example, certain B2B industries have higher churn than others. From a B2C point of view, younger audiences run more than one email account, and happily swop and change. Applying this on a global scale simplifies what is essentially a complicated question.
What I recommend is some analytics of your email database.
Pull a segment of those people who have not opened your emails in the last 3 months but have continued to receive them.
Include the date that they joined/opted in to your list.
Calculate how long it is between the date that they last read one of your emails, and the date that they joined your list.
Plotting the times for each record on a scattergram will allow you to see if any clusters of behaviour emerge. You'll then be able to see if there is an average amount of time for your lists.
Unfortunately, there is no hard and fast rule out there, but this simple analysis may start giving you some clues on your own data.
Hope this helps - don't hesitate to contact me if you'd like to talk about this more.
Paul
Velo// - a technology led marketing agency.
Paul.Crabtree@velomarketing.co.uk
Managing Director at indiumonline
07 September 2010 14:27pm
Hi Anonymous,
We've published a white paper about email data cleanliness that includes some stats on suppressing non-openers.
You'll find it in our selection of online marketing white papers in the email section.
Hope it helps
Chloe
Head of Social Media at Econsultancy
14 September 2010 11:56am
It's certainly a complicated issue. It might be more practical to examine your own bounce/non-deliverable rates as a starting point. Our own research showed that on average around 3.6% of UK marketing emails bounce (The US has a slightly higher 4.1%, While Germany averaged 4.4%). Overall, agencies estimated that between 10 and 14% of all sent email was registered undeliverable, so not quite the third of the market claimed in the article but still a significant chunk given email's strong ROI.
If it isn't completely impractical it may be worth checking which email addresses are bouncing and doing some research (even google or Facebook searches will probably prove valuable in this case) to track down their owners and update their information? If you are working on a larger scale then obviously hiring/assigning a research team specifically should be considered, particularly if you have a number of addresses bouncing which have ordered previously.
You might also want to check out our Email Marketing Statistics guide, which contains more information on delivery and bounce rates which should help you focus further research.