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What is the average lifespan of an email address?
Hi - would anyone have statistics on the average lifespan of an email address? E.g. after one year, on average x% of your audience changed email address (resulting no email activity or bounce).
I found a number of 2-4% per month and one of 30% changed address after a year.
Kind regards
Alain
I think the 30% figure sounds reasonable. I read it on HubSpot some time back.
Personally, I think it could be bigger, given the rate at which people jump from one job to another these days :)
That brings up an interesting point that it may very much depend on your market, weather people are more likely to use a work email or a personal one.
Anecdotally, I've only had my work address since 2014, but I think I set my personal one up around 2000
I don't have any stats at my fingertips, but in general the rule has been that you can expect about a third of your email subscribership to turn over every year. Some of that is due to people abandoning their email accounts or leaving them when they change jobs. The latter certainly elevates that factor for B2B companies.
Yes, I believe overall that it is 30% of people who change their email addresses annually. Unfortunately I think this statistic doesn't have much value for many as segmentation and markets differs greatly for each email list. B2B may have a lot of turnover in the workplace and that percentage per year might be a lot higher than 30% based on the industry marketed to. Also subscribers you lose won't all be abandoned email accounts, just unsubscribes as they still use those accounts, just not for your emails anymore. That's being a bit picky about the subject, but thought it was worth pointing out.
If you market a lot to personal emails, mainly those tied to mobile accounts, the percentage turn over will probably be much lower. Buying apps on iPhone/Android where people tied actual investment value to those email accounts will be their primary for a longer time like me (have my personal account for over 11 years).
It's better to look more at inactive subscribers after a set time period (like 6 months). If you are using a email marketing platform like MailChimp or Aweber, you will have statistics to look at to see who hasn't been opening your emails in 6 last months. Then you can manually unsubscribe the inactive ones. Also pay attention to autoresponders, most will be out of office notices. Some will have "this email is no longer monitored", but may have an alternative email listed if you need to get in touch with the company. An opportunity to keep that business with a new contact, just send a direct message to ask for a subscription with the benefits of what the last contact got from your company.
Just some thoughts.
Hi Alain!
This is a great question, and this can be of concern to the email marketing industry. We could be sending out emails to addresses that are no longer active, and this is a hindrance to keeping a regular clientele.
I have not found specific material or research that provides exact information regarding this, but I have noticed that a lot of users have email addresses linked to their ISPs. As such, it may be important to consider that email addresses can change in an average of 2 years. However, for those using email clients such as Gmail, Yahoo, or Hotmail, they may keep their email addresses longer.
It would be great if exact data is available, though. Thank you for raising this concern! :)
Hi Alain, I cant give you any firm data but I have often come across quotes when looking for the same information that the average email churn rate for an email marketing list is around 30% of all email addresses