eMedia Daily

List Retention Analysis

Taking what he learned from newspaper database anayltics, Douglas Karr puts his database knowledge to use in examining list retention analysis for email marketing lists.

Retention Analysis on email subscribers is valuable for a number of reasons:

1. With low retention comes high junk/spam reporting. Monitoring your list retention will assist you in building your reputation and avoiding deliverability issues with Internet Service Providers.
2. Setting retention goals is a great means of ensuring your content is up to snuff. It will basically tell you how many times you can risk poor content before a subscriber decides to bail.
3. Retention analysis will tell you how bad your lists are degrading and how many subscribers you must continue to add to maintain your list counts and; as a result, your revenue goals.

How to Measure Retention and Attrition on your List:

To start, the spreadsheet basically takes every subscriber and calculates the date they started and their unsubscribe date (if they’ve unsubscribed. Be sure to check out the calculations - they do a nice job of hiding info where it should be blank and counting only on conditions.)

You’ll see the resulting grid holds the total days they were subscribed if they have unsubscribed. This is the information that I will utilize in the second portion of the analysis to calculate the retention rate at each week.

A retention curve is pretty standard in any industry that measures subscriptions, but it can also be utilized to analyze retention for other industries - food delivery (how many deliveries and how often before someone leaves for good… perhaps a special ‘thanks’ right before that point is in order), haircuts, movie rentals… you name it and you can calculate attrition and retention for your clientèle.

Retaining clients is typically much less expensive than acquiring new ones (you can use Retention Analysis to calculate that). With my fake example, you’ll see that simply to maintain my list counts, I have to add another 30+% of subscribers within a few months. There’s currently no Email Marketing standards for Retention Analysis - so depending on your industry and your campaigns, your list retention and attrition may vary dramatically.

To read more and to download the spreadsheet sample, visit The Marketing Technology Blog.