Churn rate: who's leaving, how, and which leak to fix first
Churn is people leaving. On your list they unsubscribe or bounce. In your shop they just stop buying. On a subscription they cancel. Each one needs a different fix.
- 016Churn
- The rate at which subscribers leave your email list, including unsubscribes and bounces.
- List churn
- Unsubscribes, bounces and spam complaints over a period
- Silent churn
- Subscribers who stop opening and never unsubscribe
- Customer churn
- Customers well past their usual gap between orders
- Opposite of
- Retention, measured over the same window
Working out list churn, and the parts to read separately
Add up the unsubscribes, hard bounces and spam complaints in a month, divide by the subscribers you started the month with, and multiply by a hundred. That's list churn.
Then pull the three apart. An unsubscribe is a polite goodbye. A hard bounce is a dead address, from a typo, a fake sign-up or an account that's since been closed. A complaint is the expensive one, because mailbox providers count it against you, and Google's sender guidelines tell bulk senders to keep complaints low.
There's a leak the sum doesn't show. Silent subscribers stop opening and stay put, and a sunset flow is how you deal with them before they drag your sender reputation down.
Customer churn has no cancel button
Shoppers don't cancel. They drift. So customer churn has to be defined by time. Work out your usual gap between orders, and treat a customer as lapsed once they've gone well past it with nothing new. That's when a win-back earns its send, not a round ninety days for everyone.
Subscriptions are the exception, and they need splitting too. Some cancellations are a change of mind. Plenty are a failed card, or a box arriving before the last one's finished, and email can fix both. Subscription churn has a playbook of its own.
Related terms
FAQs
Is churn the same as unsubscribe rate?
No, unsubscribes are one part of it. List churn also counts dead addresses and spam complaints, and the people who quietly stop opening never show up in any of those. That's why a steady unsubscribe rate can sit on top of a list that's going quiet. Watch clicks per subscriber alongside it.
What's a normal churn rate for an email list?
There's no benchmark worth borrowing, because it depends on how you collect addresses and how often you send. Every list loses people over time, and some of that is healthy. Track yours month by month, and treat a jump in complaints as urgent even when the total looks fine.
When should a customer count as churned?
When they've gone clearly past your usual gap between orders. Work that gap out from your own order history, per category if they differ a lot, and pick the point where a normal customer would long since have reordered. It's a different answer for coffee and for sofas.
Rather we explained it on your own account?
Bring your Klaviyo account to a growth consultation. We'll walk through what this means for your numbers, in plain English, and what we'd fix first.
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