What is unsubscribe rate?

Unsubscribe rate is the share of a campaign's sends that ended a subscription: unsubscribes divided by sends. Every send spends a little audience goodwill; this is the metric that says how much. Unlike opens and clicks, which measure what a message gained, unsubscribes measure what it permanently cost.

Formula

unsubscribe rate = unsubscribes ÷ sends

Worked example

A 50,000-send campaign triggers 150 unsubscribes: 0.3% — routine churn. A more aggressive campaign to the same list triggers 600: 1.2%, past the 1% alert line. Those 600 people are gone from every future campaign; if a subscriber is worth a few euros a year in margin, the aggressive send traded a one-off revenue bump for a recurring loss.

How Saldo Metrics computes it

fact_messaging_performance stores unsubscribes per campaign or flow-message row; v_messaging_performance divides by sends, and the flow views recompute from totals per automation. v_list_health averages the unsubscribe rate over the last three sends per channel and medium — a deliberately short window, so one bad campaign moves it immediately — and flags ALERT when that recent average exceeds 1%; below that it reads HEALTHY. The same threshold drives the red highlighting on the campaign table.

Why it matters

Unsubscribe rate is the messaging channel's cost side that no invoice shows. Send frequency, segmentation and offer aggressiveness all optimize to higher short-term revenue and higher unsubscribes; this metric is the counterweight that prices the trade. A rising trend across campaigns is the earliest sign a list is being over-mailed — visible before opens sag and long before deliverability suffers.

Common mistakes

• Judging a campaign on revenue while ignoring its unsubscribe cost. The campaign that "won" the month can be the one that shrank the list the most.
• Reading a flow step's high unsubscribe rate like a campaign's. Early automation steps (say, the first post-purchase email) mail everyone including the never-interested; some churn there is the flow doing its filtering.
• Relaxing because the rate is below 1%. The threshold marks trouble, not health — a doubling from 0.2% to 0.4% is a real signal that stays green.

Where you see this in the app

Marketing → Messaging, as the unsubscribe-rate column of the campaign table (highlighted past 1%) and inside the list-health status.