Is there a way to see how much an email list decays per month? If so, can you also segment this data by source?

[Anonymous]

I am trying to determine list decay preferably on a month to month basis segmented by source.

[David_Gaible]

Hi Ashley White​,

You can simply have a monthly subscription to an Email Performance Report that shows all of the emails that were sent in the previous month. In this report be sure to include the 'Unsubscribed' column. That's going to show you the emails that your database unsubscribed from that month. You can also set up similar reports with subscriptions to show you hard bounces during the month to see additional ways your database is decaying.

Finally, all of these reports can be filtered on additional criteria if you are comparing separate lists. The ability to add Smart List filters to reports is powerful!

[Anonymous]

Hi David,

I know that unsubscribes, and bounded emails are a portion of list decay metrics, however, I am trying to zone in on people that did not open emails. I want to be able to determine how long a person was actively opening and clicking on our emails and the point where activity or engagement began to decline. I send about 30 or so emails a month and I know that there are filters within Marketo for unopened emails and 'did not click', but I do not want to count this towards specific emails that were sent. I want this information as a collective whole. Ideally, I am looking to identify graymail, and subscribers who had previously interacted (within the last month or 3 month period) and are no longer engaged and the point in time when they began to disengage.

[David_Gaible]

Got it! To get exactly what you're looking for, you're going to need to export the activity log to an outside database and perform the analysis there. This thread might get you started in the right direction: Activity Log API Connector​.

But, I think you can get a sense of what you're looking for by running some experiments in Marketo. It seems as though your hypothesis (or at least one of them) is that 'the volume of emails, not the content, is lowering engagement'. Run some experiments where you have a cohort that receives your the standard of cadence of emails, and one several that receive decreases cadence. Compare the engagement across the cohorts.

Hope this helps, and good luck!