Unsubscribe Rate

email metric

01 Definition

Unsubscribe Rate meaning: The percentage of email recipients who opt out of a list after a given send.

Unsubscribe rate is the number of unsubscribes divided by emails delivered, shown as a percentage. It signals how well content matches audience expectations. A single high figure may reflect one bad send rather than a lasting problem, so watch the trend.

Also called

opt-out rate

Why it matters

How Unsubscribe Rate fits the work

Rising opt-outs warn that messaging, frequency, or targeting is off, letting you adjust before engagement and deliverability suffer further.

In context

A newsletter sent to 40,000 delivered inboxes saw 80 unsubscribes, an unsubscribe rate of 0.2 percent.

!

Practical note

Calculate it against delivered emails, not sent, and compare similar campaigns, since a promotion and a newsletter can have very different normal rates.