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How many newsletter subscribers will my site have in a year?

18 October 2026

In email list or search traffic we worked out what one subscriber is worth. This post asks the step before that: how many subscribers will you actually have in a year or two, from the traffic you have now?

How a list grows

Every month a share of your visitors sign up and a share of the list leaves. The list after a month is last month's list, less the share who left, plus this month's visits x the sign-up rate.

• The sign-up rate is yours to measure: sign-ups in a month divided by that month's visits. Sumo put the average for sites using its sign-up forms at 1.95%; the calculator's 1% is a cautious assumption below that.
• People leave every month - they unsubscribe, change jobs or abandon an address. HubSpot, citing MarketingSherpa, puts list decay at about 22.5% a year, roughly 2% a month.
• A list with a steady loss has a ceiling. When the sign-ups each month equal the people lost, it stops growing - only more traffic or a better sign-up rate raises it.

Work out your list in two years

Type your visits a month, the share who sign up, the subscribers you have now, the share you lose a month and your traffic growth. The calculator shows the list after the months you choose, when it passes 1,000 and where it levels off - with a chart of every month.

Prefer a full page? Open the newsletter growth calculator on CalcSA. To put a value on the list, the email list vs search traffic calculator prices a subscriber against a search visitor; the growth rate calculator turns two traffic numbers into a monthly growth rate.

Worked example: the calculator's defaults

A site with 5,000 visits a month, growing 3% a month, where 1% of visitors sign up, 2% of the list leaves each month and the list starts at zero.

• After 12 months the list has 641 subscribers.
• After 24 months it has 1,417 - 1,721 signed up and 304 left.
• It passes 1,000 subscribers in month 18.
• At today's 5,000 visits it would level off at 2,500 - 50 sign-ups a month against 2% of 2,500 leaving.

Four more cases, same defaults except the one shown, after 24 months:

• Flat traffic, no growth: 961 subscribers - growth adds almost half again.
• 2% sign up instead of 1%: 2,834 subscribers - double the rate, double the list.
• 5% of the list lost a month: 1,088 subscribers - a quarter fewer.
• A bigger site, 50,000 visits a month: 14,170 subscribers - the list scales with the traffic.

Estimates. The 5,000 visits, 1% sign-up rate, 2% monthly loss and 3% growth are assumptions, as in the calculator; your own counter and email tool show your real numbers.

Two years of a list, by how many leave

Same site, with nobody leaving, 2% leaving a month and 5% leaving a month:

• The gap opens slowly and then fast - a bigger list loses more people a month at the same rate.
• In the first six months the loss hardly shows, which is why a young list looks healthier than it is.
• Cleaning out dead addresses makes the loss look worse but the list better - the people left actually read.

Reading your counter for this

Your WebCounter counter shows the visits and the growth that feed the list. No counter yet? Get your free WebCounter counter - it takes a minute and costs nothing.

• Visits a month are the unique visitors on your WebCounter report for the last 30 days.
• Your growth rate is this month's visits against last month's - or use the growth rate calculator on two numbers further apart.
• Your sign-up rate is your email tool's sign-ups for the month divided by those visits.
• Watch the pages that sign people up: the pages report shows which posts get the visits, so put your best sign-up box there first.

Sources

• Sumo, email opt-in rate study (sumo.com) - 1.95% average sign-up rate for its forms. Not re-checked at the original on 18 October 2026.
• HubSpot, citing MarketingSherpa - email lists decay by about 22.5% a year. Not re-checked at the original on 18 October 2026.
• Calculator: CalcSA, Newsletter growth.

Estimates only. Sign-up and unsubscribe rates vary widely by niche and by how you ask; your own email tool's numbers beat any average.