Opt-Out Rate
Under 0.5% per campaign is healthy; spikes are a consent-quality alarm. Carriers watch the same number you do.
Opt-out rate is the channel's honesty meter. Benchmarks: established programs with clean opt-in typically see 0.2-0.5% per campaign; above 1% consistently means subscribers did not expect or want the messages; the first message to a new list is diagnostic — a big STOP wave on message one means the consent capture itself misled people.
Why it matters beyond list shrinkage: carriers and CSPs monitor complaint and opt-out signals per campaign, and elevated rates feed filtering decisions and program reviews. Plaintiff firms also read high-churn programs as consent-defect evidence.
Levers: set expectations precisely at opt-in (content and frequency), honor the promised cadence, segment rather than blast, prune unengaged subscribers before they prune you, and front-load value in the first messages after signup — the highest-churn moment in the lifecycle.
Frequently asked questions
Related glossary terms
An opt-out is a consumer's revocation of SMS consent. Under the FCC's revocation rules, any reasonable method counts — not just STOP — and senders must honor it within 10 business days.
A suppression list is the registry of phone numbers that have revoked consent. Senders must check this list before every outbound send to remain TCPA-compliant.
Carrier filtering is the automated blocking or throttling of SMS that carriers judge unregistered, off-use-case, or spam-like — often without any error returned to the sender.