One of the first questions I get when I start working on email marketing with a new client is: "Is my open rate good?" The honest answer is usually: it depends. Depends on your industry, the age and quality of your list, your sending frequency, and what you're actually comparing against.
Industry benchmarks are useful as a starting point. But chasing averages can lead you to make the wrong decisions. Here's what the numbers actually say, where they come from, and how to use them sensibly.
If you want to see how this applies to your specific list, my email marketing in North Wales service always starts with an audit of current performance before making any recommendations.
Where these numbers come from
The most widely referenced email marketing benchmarks come from platforms like Mailchimp, Campaign Monitor, and Klaviyo, who publish annual reports based on billions of emails sent through their platforms. These are real data sets, not surveys. They're a reasonable reference point, with caveats I'll come to.
Open rate benchmarks by industry
Open rates vary significantly by sector. Across all industries, Mailchimp's data puts the average around 21-22%. But that average includes some sectors pulling the number up and others dragging it down.
Professional services (consultants, accountants, solicitors) tend to see open rates of 22-24%. The audience has opted in to receive professional content and tends to engage with it.
Retail and e-commerce typically sits lower at around 17-20%. Higher sending volumes and more promotional content reduce the average, and there's more competition in inboxes from other retailers.
Hospitality, tourism, and food and drink hover around 18-20%. Seasonal campaigns (Christmas menus, summer bookings) can spike much higher. Off-season sends often sit lower.
Health, wellness, and fitness tends to perform well at 22-25%, particularly for practitioners with a personal brand. People who've seen a physio or personal trainer and liked the experience are highly likely to open emails from them.
Charities and non-profits often see the highest open rates across any sector, sometimes above 25%, driven by strong emotional connection with the cause.
Local trades and services vary widely, but businesses with a strong local reputation and a well-maintained list often see 25-35% open rates. The list is smaller and more personal. That matters.
Click-through rates
Click-through rate (CTR) measures the percentage of people who clicked a link within your email. The industry average across all sectors is around 2-3% of recipients, or roughly 10-15% of openers.
For promotional emails with a single, clear call to action (a sale, a new service, a booking link), you'd hope to see 2-5%. For newsletters or content-led emails with multiple links, individual link click rates are naturally lower but total engagement can be similar.
If your open rate is reasonable but your CTR is very low (under 1%), the problem is usually in the email itself: too many competing calls to action, a weak or unclear offer, or a link that's hard to find on mobile.
Unsubscribe rates
This is the metric people worry about most, and often the one that matters least. An unsubscribe rate under 0.5% per send is generally healthy. Between 0.5% and 1% is a signal to look at your content or frequency. Consistently above 1% means something's wrong, usually that you're sending to people who don't remember signing up, or sending too often, or that the content isn't delivering what people expected.
A small spike in unsubscribes after a particularly promotional email is normal and not a cause for alarm. You'd rather someone unsubscribe than mark you as spam. The spam rate is the more important number to watch.
Deliverability and spam rates
Deliverability is the percentage of emails that actually reach inboxes. A good deliverability rate is above 95%. If you're seeing deliverability below 90%, something is wrong with your sender reputation, your list quality, or your email infrastructure (SPF, DKIM, DMARC records).
Your spam rate should be below 0.1% per send. Google and Yahoo made changes in 2024 tightening their spam thresholds, and repeatedly hitting spam rates above 0.1% will start to affect deliverability across major email clients. If you're getting reports from people that your emails aren't arriving, deliverability is the first place to look.
List growth benchmarks
Healthy email lists grow, but they also churn. Industry data suggests that email lists naturally decay by around 20-25% per year through unsubscribes, bounces, and dormant addresses. That means a list that isn't being actively grown is actually shrinking in effective terms.
A sustainable list growth rate varies enormously by business type. An e-commerce brand might add hundreds of addresses per month. A local services business might add five to twenty. What matters is that new subscribers are regularly joining and that the list represents genuinely interested people, not a database of old contacts imported from ten years ago.
Why averages can be misleading
Here's the point that most benchmark articles skip over. A 10% open rate from a tightly targeted list of 300 engaged customers can be worth far more commercially than a 25% open rate from a cold list of 5,000 people who half-remember signing up two years ago.
Open rate is a proxy for engagement, and engagement is a proxy for commercial value. A small list of genuinely interested people who buy from you regularly is an enormously valuable asset. A large list with low engagement is largely noise.
I've worked with clients who were despondent about a 14% open rate until we looked at the revenue generated from those emails. The list was small, the open rate was below average, and the monthly email was generating a consistent 15-20% of their total revenue. That's not a problem. That's a functioning channel.
Conversely, I've seen clients with impressive open rates and almost no conversions. High open rates from content-only emails that never ask for anything produce exactly that result.
The uncomfortable truth: open rate is partly vanity. Click rate, reply rate, and revenue per send are the numbers that determine whether your email programme is worth running. I've seen lists with 40% open rates and essentially zero commercial value because every email was a content update with no offer and no call to action. Open rates tell you whether people like your subject lines. Everything else tells you whether the emails are working.
How to improve your benchmarks
Improving open rates: subject lines are the biggest lever. Test shorter vs longer, question formats vs statement formats, including the recipient's name or company vs not. Most email platforms have A/B testing for subject lines built in. Use it.
Segment your list and send more targeted emails. Sending the same email to your entire list is rarely the highest-performing approach. If you can identify who bought which service, who engaged with which content, or who is in which geographic area, more targeted sends will outperform blanket campaigns.
Clean your list regularly. Removing addresses that haven't opened an email in twelve months improves your overall engagement rate, and protects your sender reputation. It feels counterintuitive to make your list smaller, but a smaller, engaged list consistently outperforms a bloated, disengaged one.
Improving click-through rates: simplify your emails. One primary call to action per email outperforms emails with five links to different things. Make the CTA visually clear and put it near the top as well as at the bottom.
For more on why open rates drop and how to fix it, read why nobody is opening my marketing emails. And if you're unsure what to actually put in your campaigns, what should I send to my email list covers the content question.
The most useful email marketing benchmark isn't an industry average. It's your own performance over time. If your open rates are trending up, your list is growing, and your emails are generating enquiries or sales, the strategy is working, regardless of where you sit relative to the industry average. Set up proper tracking, understand your numbers, and improve from your own baseline.
If you'd like help getting more from your email list, take a look at how I approach email marketing for small businesses in North Wales and beyond.
