Subscriber Engagement Half-Life

If you weren’t able to attend Dan Zarrella’s Science of Email Marketing webinar, he posted his slides and video here. There are some really interesting findings in that presentation, generated by analyzing over 9.5 billion emails in our Email Genome Project. There’s stuff I never would’ve thought to ask, like "effect of time-of-day on unsubscribe rate" (slide 17).

But this is the stat I found most interesting (slide 45):

After about 4 months, your average click rate for your average email subscriber drops to less than 1%.

We could talk about ways to keep people engaged longer, like sending more frequently (I think Mr. Zarrella recommends this in his presentation), sending less frequently, engaging with people on alternate channels (like Twitter and Facebook), and on and on. But 9.5 billion emails tell you something. You’ve basically got 4 months to entertain, delight, sell, and make your point to subscribers. More importantly, you need to do something awesome enough to keep feeding in new subscribers, because the churn might be faster than you think.