What are good subscribe rates for email newsletters?
- Published by
- Posted on
- 3 Comments
By Zach and Elizabeth
This is the last post of our 3 part series on open rates, click-through-rates, and subscribe rates for email newsletters. Here’s what we’ve learned about subscribe/unsubscribe rates from stats on LaunchBit, an ad network for email newsletters.
What are good subscribe/unsubscribe rates?
To the extent of our data, subscription rates in our network are largely biforcated. You are either growing your readership relatively slowly: 1-2% growth or you are doing crazy well and growing beyond 10% growth. Since we don’t know how our publishers grow their lists, I surmise that the high growth publishers in our network are using paid acquisition methods to achieve 10%+ growth rate.
For unsubscribe rates, there is a skew towards a 1-3% unsubscribe rate. In other words, if the plurality of publishers are on that end of the spectrum for both subscribe and unsubscribe rates, it means that most lists are not growing overall or are growing really slowly…
From the aggregate average data, it was difficult to see how a newsletter really grows. But, after talking with a sample of successful newsletter publishers (lists 50k+), we found that generally speaking, their lists
- Grow linearly, not exponentially
- The slope of that linear growth increases for a while when prominent people or companies plug their lists
This concludes our 3 part series on email newsletter findings and insights.