Email unsubscribe vs. clicks

Open rate is one of the key metrics for tracking your email campaigns. It tells you what percentage of your audience found the subject line engaging enough to take a look.

But once a user opens your email, there are two different metrics you need to look out for: unsubscribes and clicks.

Let's unpack each of these metrics and look at how they work together.

Email unsubscribes

The unsubscribe rate for your email campaigns should never exceed 0.5%.

If your campaigns are already over that mark, it likely means you're doing one of these things wrong:

• Targeting too many users with your campaign
• Sending a message that is irrelevant to a lot of users
• Being too pushy with discounts and sales promotions

The difference between 0.2% and 0.7% may seem small, but it can make a big difference to the future success of your campaigns.

If your emails consistently get unsubscribe rates over 0.5%, you'll automatically start going to the Promotions tab in email clients. Or, even worse, spam.

Email clicks

The typical clickthrough rate (CTR) for email campaigns is 1-2%. This is the percentage of recipients who clicked on the call to action in your email.

Here are a few popular examples you may include in your campaigns:

• Rate our app
• Check out our latest feature
• Buy refill
• Get 20% off
• And so on

By targeting the right audiences and following our best practice advice, we've seen companies massively outperform CTR benchmarks.

How unsubscribes and clicks work together

The good news is that unsubscribes and clicks are on the same team. You can improve both metrics by following the same key principle. It all comes down to sending emails to the right users at the right time. 

Let's look at a real-world example to show how you can get this right:

• Imagine that your company sells photo printers and digital photo frames, each of which has 10,000 users.
• As an extra revenue stream, you decide to start selling printer ink and want to send out a campaign about it.
• You know printer ink is irrelevant to your digital photo frame users, so you immediately cut them out of your audience.
• You also know from your device data that a quarter of your printer users have ink levels over 50%, so you cut them out too. You'll create an automated campaign for them later.
• This has cut your audience size down from 20,000 to 7,500, but it's going to deliver far fewer unsubscribes and much higher click rates.