Email Churn Rate: Five Ways to Keep Customers from Leaving
You are an email marketer and know the importance of building an email list for email marketing. Have you ever experienced a situation where new subscribers continuously observe a continuous decrease in your email list? If yes, then this article is meant for you. Such a situation where your email list shrinks in its size is called email churn. It has been observed that email churn causes a 20% to 30% decrease in the email list size annually. It does not matter how effectively you have built up your email list through double opt-in. Your email list will continuously shrink in size if your email list growth rate is less than the churn rate.
So, if you want to know how to combat such a silentcampaign killing situation,CBT mass email sender is here to provide you with a complete guide on how to reduce your email churn rate and to keep your customers from leaving.
Email list churn rate
Email list churn rate refers to the number of subscribers that leave your email list in a defined period of time. To have a deep understanding of the email churn rate, the email churn has been classified into two categories.
Transparent churn
Opaque churn
Transparent churn
Transparent churn is also known as voluntary churn because this churn results when your subscribers voluntarily leave unsubscribe to your email list. It includes the subscribers that no longer want to receive emails from you. Hard bounces resulting from invalid email addresses and the people who mark your email as spam or delete it are also included in the category of transparent churn.
Opaque churn
Opaque churn occurs when your subscribers ignore your emails and don't bother to open them. There might be two reasons for opaque churn. Either your emails land in your subscribers' spam folder or they are no longer interested in your email content. This is also known as involuntary email churn. This can be fixed through re-engagement techniques.
Is email list churn a big problem
Email list churn in itself is not such a big problem, but it can lead to further bigger problems. However, it is an alarm that can indicate if your email campaign needs some improvements. If many people unsubscribe to your email list, it means there is some serious issue with your emails and that you need immediate improvements. So, a subscription by a few people is healthy for your campaign. But, when a large audience unsubscribes, you need to take serious action. You may need to change your target audience as you may send your campaign to the wrong people. You can also segment your list for a control. A high churn rate also indicates that you need to clean your email database.
How to find out the email churn rate?
There are many methods through which you can check your email list's churn rate, but none of them guarantees 100% accuracy. However, some tips are recommended to take care of while combating the email churn rate. These include
- Select a particular time period to measure the email churn rate during it.
- Calculate the number of subscribers that you lose during that selected time.
- Divide the number of subscribers lost by the total number of subscribers.
This method helps to calculate the transparent churn rate. Measuring opaque churn is actually a challenge as you need to know how many emails could not reach your subscribers' inbox.
5 methods to reduce your customer churn rate
If you have calculated your email churn and it has appeared to be a huge value. You don't need to pain, as the following tips can help you minimize the issue.
Look for the reason behind churn
Without knowing the root cause of your email churn, you cannot minimize the risk. You have to figure out that why your customers have decided to unsubscribe you. The best way to know this is to communicate with your subscribers, not through email but phone numbers. Call them and talk to them personally about the reason behind their leaving.
Most people complain that the organization does not genuinely care about its audience and send irrelevant emails. Calling out your audience helps you to sort out the issue.
Engage with your customers
If you want to reduce your email churn rate, one of the effective ways is to engage your customers consistently through your content. Show them how your product or service is valuable for your audience and make it a part of their workflow. Provide them with the content that must emphasize the importance of your product and service. Send them regular updates, inform them about upcoming events, make announcements about special offers to trap your audience.
Engage with your prospects not only through email marketing but also through social networking sites. This can help you build a better customer relationship.
Provide value to your customer
Check the results of your campaign to look for the subscribers who provide the most value to you. Make them feel special by returning this value to them. You can send them special gifts or offers. Not only such special subscribers, but you also need to provide value to your other subscribers. Because they have gone the extra mile to give you their email address, you must offer them something really valuable to enhance their trust and confidence in you.
Educate your audience
Educate your prospects about the things that they probably don't know, but they should know, or they need to know. You can provide them with special free courses. When your audience feels like they are being educated through your emails, they would love to hear more from you.
Target the right audience
The last but the most important thing to keep in mind is to target the right audience. This helps you build a good quality email list, with good statistics like email open rate, click rate, and conversion. People only unsubscribe when they feel irrelevant. So, segment your list and send relevant content to the right audience.