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Metrics type: Cross-Platform Metrics • Category: Email Marketing
Spike = post-purchase programme over-mailing.

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At a glance

Share of customers who unsubscribed from Dotdigital marketing within 7 days of placing an order. Computed as COUNT(distinct unsubscribers WHERE unsub_timestamp <= order_timestamp + 7 days) ÷ COUNT(distinct purchasers in period). The single best canary for post-purchase over-mailing, when this rate climbs, your post-purchase programme is sending too many touches and customers are firing back the only signal they have.

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Calculation

Calculated automatically from your Dotdigital data. See the At a glance summary above for what the metric tracks and the worked example below for a typical reading.

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Worked example

A UK DTC homewares brand on BigCommerce + Dotdigital. Window covers 12 Jan 26 to 12 Apr 26 (90 days). Post-purchase programme behaviour over the 7 days following purchase: What’s interesting:
  1. 3.32% post-purchase unsub rate trips the >3% alert. This is actionable, the merchant is over-mailing the post-purchase population. Most healthy DTC programmes run at 1.5 to 2.5%.
  2. 6 promotional touches in 7 days is too many. Industry best practice is 2 to 3 touches in the first 7 days post-purchase: a thank-you (Day 1), a review request (Day 5 to 7), and optionally one cross-sell or care-guide. Day 2 + Day 3 + Day 5 + Day 7 promotional sends compound; the audience is recently-purchased customers who came for a specific item, not for daily merchant emails.
  3. The unsub rate climbs day-over-day, peaking at Day 5. The classic over-mailing signature, the first 1 to 2 touches feel welcome; by Day 5 the customer perceives it as spam. The fix is to remove Day 2 and Day 5 entirely, leaving Day 1 (thank-you), Day 3 (review request), and Day 7 (optional loyalty nudge).
  4. Day 0 transactional confirmation has near-zero unsubs (0.02%). This is the right baseline; transactional emails are expected and welcomed. Promotional touches following a transactional touch must clear a higher bar.
  5. The cost of over-mailing is twice the unsub rate. Each unsubscribed customer represents not just one churned email contact but the lost revenue from their next 12 to 24 months of nurture. At a typical email-attributed AOV of £40 and post-purchase repurchase rate of 25%, 612 unsubs represents roughly £6,100 of forfeit pipeline revenue. The 3 to 5 percentage points of saved unsub rate is worth far more than the marginal revenue from Day 2 and Day 5 sends.
The actionable read: cut the post-purchase programme from 6 touches to 3 (Day 1, Day 3, Day 7), retest after 30 days. Most merchants see post-purchase unsub rate drop to 1.5 to 2% with no loss in attributed revenue.

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Sibling cards merchants should reference together

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Reconciling against the vendor’s own dashboard

Where to look in Dotdigital: Dotdigital does not expose a “post-purchase unsub” view natively. The closest screens for cross-checking the inputs: Where to look in BigCommerce / Magento: The denominator (purchasers in the period) comes from the connected commerce platform. In BigCommerce: Analytics → Orders → unique customers in window. The match between BC unique purchasers and Dotdigital Placed Order event count is the diagnostic for “is the order pixel firing on every order”. Why our number may legitimately differ from Dotdigital’s reports: Cross-connector reconciliation: The most useful view is the gap between this card and the general unsubscribe rate. A 0.5pp general rate paired with a 3.3% post-purchase rate is a 6.6× over-index, that’s the over-mailing signature.

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Known limitations / merchant FAQs

What’s a healthy post-purchase unsub rate? Below 1.5% is healthy; 1.5 to 3% is acceptable; above 3% suggests over-mailing. The benchmark varies by category: B2B and considered-purchase verticals (homewares, furniture) typically see 1 to 2%; impulse-purchase verticals (fast fashion, beauty) see 2 to 3.5%; flash-sale / one-time-promotion businesses can see 4%+ and consider it a cost of doing business. Compare against your own general unsub rate; if this card is 5 to 10× higher, the gap is the over-mailing signal. My post-purchase unsub rate is 4% but our revenue is fine. Should I care? Yes. The unsubscribed customers are gone from your nurture stream forever; you can never email them again without a fresh re-opt-in. At a 4% rate over 12 months, you’re losing 48% of your purchaser base from email coverage. Post-purchase nurture is one of the highest-ROI marketing efforts (existing customers convert 5 to 10× higher than first-timers); losing it costs more than the marginal Day 5 promotional send delivers. How quickly will the rate drop after I cut programme touches? The post-purchase unsub rate is a 90-day rolling window, so changes show up over weeks, not days. Cut Day 2 and Day 5 sends today; the card’s reading will start dropping from Day 30 onward; full effect is visible by Day 90. To see the immediate impact faster, look at the per-step unsub-per-send rate in the Dotdigital programme report rather than the rolling 90-day card. Should I send to recent purchasers at all? Yes, but selectively. Day-1 thank-you and Day-7 review request are nearly always net-positive. Day-2 and Day-3 cross-sell sends drive incremental revenue but at high unsub cost; test removing them. Day-5 “care guide” or “how to use” content typically has mixed results, depending on the product (high for complex products like skincare or appliances; low for simple products like apparel). My post-purchase unsub rate spiked after Black Friday. Is this normal? Yes, post-tentpole unsub spikes are common because (a) discount-driven first-time buyers have lower brand affinity than full-price returners, and (b) BFCM cohorts often hit programme cadences designed for higher-affinity audiences. If your card jumped from 2.5% to 5% in early December, that’s a cohort effect, not a programme problem. It typically settles by mid-January if you don’t change anything; if it stays above 4% by February, treat it as evidence the programme cadence needs tightening for discount-led cohorts. Does this card include unsubs from SMS only? Yes, both email and SMS unsubscribes count. SMS unsubscribes (STOP messages) are typically less common in volume but more decisive because the customer had to manually text a reply, no accidental clicks. A high SMS-unsub share within this card is a stronger over-mailing signal than email-only unsubs. My customers unsubscribe via the email but stay on SMS, do they count? The card pools all unsubscribe events. A partial unsub (email-only or SMS-only) counts once. To split, use the Suppressions view in Dotdigital and filter by channel; full-channel unsub is a stronger signal but partial unsubs still indicate fatigue. Spam complaints, are those counted? Yes. A spam-complaint event in the 7-day post-purchase window is implicit unsubscribe and counts in the numerator. Spam complaints are far more damaging than explicit unsubs because they hurt sender reputation; a card reading driven by spam complaints (visible in the Dotdigital programme report’s per-step breakdown) is a 5-alarm fire, immediate programme pause is warranted. What should my post-purchase programme look like for a healthy reading? For a typical DTC store: Day 1 (transactional + brief thank-you), Day 3 (review request, separate send), Day 7 (loyalty / referral nudge). For complex products: add Day 2 or 3 “how-to-use” content. Avoid Day 4 to 6 promotional sends entirely, that window is when fatigue peaks. For high-AOV / considered-purchase categories, stretch Day 7 to Day 10 or 14.

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Tracked live in Vortex IQ Nerve Centre

Unsubs Within 7d of Purchase is one of hundreds of KPI pulses Vortex IQ tracks across Dotdigital and 70+ other ecommerce connectors. Nerve Centre runs the detection layer; Vortex Mind investigates the cause when something moves; Ask Viq lets you interrogate any number in plain English. Start for free or book a demo to see this metric running on your own data.