Unsubscribe rate
The share of recipients who unsubscribed after a send. An easy unsubscribe keeps people who no longer want the mail from reporting it as spam instead.
What it means
Email platforms such as HubSpot report unsubscribe rate next to open, click and bounce rates for each send. Check which count your tool uses as the base before comparing figures across tools.
An unsubscribe is a better outcome than a complaint. Google's sender guidelines say letting people opt out can improve open rates, click-through rates and sending efficiency, and they require one-click unsubscribe for marketing mail from senders of more than 5,000 messages a day to Gmail. M3AAWG adds that the longer removal takes, the more likely recipients are to treat further mail as abusive and complain.
Watch for spikes after a change in frequency, audience or content: M3AAWG's warm-up guidance lists unsubscribe and complaint rate spikes among the signals to monitor.
Related terms
On this site
Sources
What this definition rests on. The wording is ours; the facts are theirs.
- HubSpot: Analyze sequence enrollment and performance dataknowledge.hubspot.com
- Google: Email sender guidelinessupport.google.com
- M3AAWG Sender Best Common Practices, version 4.0 (August 2026)m3aawg.org
All 432 terms in the glossaryThe wiki: blocklists and bounce codes