List churn
The loss of email subscribers over time through unsubscribes, hard bounces, and other defined removals.
List churn measures how an email audience loses subscribers during a period. Define which losses count, such as unsubscribes, invalid addresses, or deliberate removals. A churn rate commonly divides those losses by the subscriber count at the start of the period.
A list starting with 1,000 subscribers, gaining 100, and losing 40 finishes with 1,060. Using the starting count, churn is 4% and net growth is 6%. Gross additions alone would hide the losses.
An inactive reader has not necessarily left. Track disengagement separately unless your methodology explicitly removes inactive addresses. Privacy-affected open data is not enough to identify every disengaged subscriber.
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