You've completed Quarter 2. Six months of email best practices. This is your mid-year list health audit — a structured check-in on the metrics that matter most.
This Week’s Lesson
Run these six health metrics on your primary email list today and benchmark them against industry standards.
1. List Growth Rate: (New subscribers - Unsubscribes) / Total list size × 100. Healthy: 2-5% per month. If it's negative, list decay is outpacing acquisition.
2. Bounce Rate (hard + soft): Hard bounces above 0.5% need immediate attention. Soft bounce rate above 2% over multiple sends indicates list quality issues. Clean hard bounces immediately.
3. Spam Complaint Rate: Below 0.08% for Gmail (enforced). Above 0.3% triggers Yahoo filtering. If you're above 0.1%, investigate your acquisition sources and recent content immediately.
4. Unsubscribe Rate: Industry average is 0.2-0.5% per send. Above 1% per send means your content, frequency, or acquisition source has a problem.
5. Open Rate (adjusting for Apple MPP): For accurate engagement data, focus on click rate (above 2% is healthy), reply rate, and direct website visits from emails. MPP-inflated opens mask real engagement.
6. List Engagement Distribution: What percentage of your list has engaged in: Last 30 days (active), 31-90 days (moderately active), 91-180 days (at risk), 180+ days (inactive, should be in re-engagement or suppressed).