Your email just hit 22% open rate. Congrats. Except you have absolutely no idea if that's winning or quietly embarrassing yourself. Email marketing benchmarks vary so much by industry that 22% could mean you're doing great or falling off a cliff. And before you go comparing yourself to some all-industry average, there's something important you need to know about how open rate numbers are measured right now.
If your numbers are lagging, start with our guides on improving open rates and boosting click-through rates.
Why Open Rate Benchmarks Are Kind of a Mess
Apple dropped Mail Privacy Protection (MPP) in September 2021. It pre-fetches emails, including tracking pixels, before anyone actually opens them.
Translation: it marks emails as "opened" automatically. Even if nobody touched them.
This inflated open rates across the board, overnight. Mailchimp's current data shows an all-industry average around 35-36% opens. Campaign Monitor, whose benchmarks predate widespread MPP adoption, shows averages closer to 21.5%.
Both sets of numbers are technically correct. They're just measuring different realities.
Weird.
So when you see an "industry benchmark" for open rates, check when the data was collected. Pre-2021 and post-2021 numbers are essentially from parallel universes. Comparing them directly will make you think your campaigns are doing great when they're not, or that you're in crisis when you're fine.
With that caveat out of the way, here's what the data actually shows.
Email Open Rate Benchmarks by Industry
Current data from Mailchimp, which reflects the post-MPP landscape most senders are operating in now:
| Industry | Avg. Open Rate | Avg. Click Rate | Avg. Unsub Rate |
|---|---|---|---|
| Non-Profits | 40.04% | 3.27% | 0.18% |
| Education & Training | 35.64% | 3.02% | 0.18% |
| Business & Finance | 31.35% | 2.78% | 0.15% |
| Ecommerce | 29.81% | 1.74% | 0.19% |
| All Industries (Avg.) | 35.63% | 2.62% | 0.22% |
A few things jump out here.
Non-profits and education top the charts. This tracks. People who sign up for those lists actually want to be there, not just hunting for a discount code.
Ecommerce sits below average on opens and well below average on clicks. If you run an online store, you're competing in one of the noisiest inboxes in existence. A 30% open rate there is actually respectable.
The all-industry open rate average of 35.63% is meaningless if you're in retail. Retail, using older pre-MPP data, posts open rates around 17%. Comparing your retail brand to the "average" is like comparing your 10K race time to someone who took a bus.
Email Click-Through Rate Benchmarks by Industry
Click-through rate is the metric that actually holds up right now.
Raw clicks are harder to fake. Apple's privacy tools don't interfere with link clicks (yet). If someone clicked your email, they clicked it. Full stop.
| Industry | Avg. CTR | What It Reflects |
|---|---|---|
| Education | 4.4% | Highest. Highly engaged, opted-in audiences. |
| Real Estate & Construction | 3.6% | High intent buyers researching actively. |
| Non-Profits | 3.27% | Mission-driven content earns action. |
| Healthcare Services | 3.0% | Information-seeking audience. High value content. |
| Business & Finance | 2.78% | Solid. These subscribers track news and updates. |
| IT/Tech/Software | 2.0% | Average. Crowded inbox, jaded audience. |
| Restaurant & Food/Bev | 2.0% | Highly promotional, lower engagement per send. |
| Ecommerce | 1.74% | Below average. Banner blindness is real. |
| Travel & Hospitality | 1.4% | Seasonal spikes hide chronic underperformance. |
| Wellness & Fitness | 1.2% | Over-promotional content drags this down. |
| Retail | 0.7% | Lowest. This is what blast-and-pray looks like. |
Anything above 2.5% is solid across most industries. If you're in ecommerce sitting at 1.7%, you're not a disaster. You're average for your space.
If you're in retail at 0.7%, someone has been sending mass promos to unsegmented lists. The data just reflects that back at you.
The hot take here: if your CTR is low, the problem isn't your subject line. The problem is your list quality and what's inside the email. Segmenting your audience based on behavior fixes this faster than any subject line tweak will.
Unsubscribe and Bounce Rate Benchmarks
These two don't get enough attention. They tell you what open rates can't.
Unsubscribe rates:
An unsubscribe rate under 0.2% per campaign is healthy. Over 0.5%? Something is broken. Either your content doesn't match what people signed up for, you're mailing too aggressively, or your list grew in ways it shouldn't have.
Across industries, average unsubscribe rates sit between 0.1% and 0.22%. Wellness and fitness brands run the highest, around 0.4%. Fitness brands love sending promotional emails to people who signed up for a 10% discount code and feel zero loyalty to the brand. Shocker.
Bounce rates:
| Bounce Type | Acceptable Threshold | What Happens If You Exceed It |
|---|---|---|
| Hard bounces (invalid addresses) | Under 2%, ideally under 0.5% | Direct deliverability hit. ESPs flag you. |
| Soft bounces (temporary issues) | Under 5% | Watch for repeating offenders. |
Bounce rates above 2% mean your list health is suffering. And bad list health creates a cascading problem: worse deliverability, lower open rates, and benchmarks that look terrible even when your actual content is fine.
The Metric Nobody Talks About Enough
Click-to-open rate. CTOR.
Open rate tells you if people saw your subject line and decided to open. CTOR tells you if, once they were inside the email, they actually gave a damn.
CTOR = (unique clicks / unique opens) x 100.
A solid CTOR is 10-15% or higher. Education tops the industry charts here at 15.7%. Retail, predictably, sits at 5.8%.
If your open rate is "high" but your CTOR is 3%, people are opening out of habit (or Apple is marking them as opened), and the email content isn't landing. If your CTOR is 12% but your open rate looks low, your content is genuinely good. The problem is upstream: subject lines or deliverability.
Across client accounts we've worked with, CTOR is the fastest signal that a campaign sequence is working. Open rates tell you a story. CTOR tells you the truth.
How to Actually Improve Your Numbers
Benchmarks are interesting. Improving your own numbers is the actual job.
If your open rate is below your industry benchmark:
Stop guessing on subject lines and start testing systematically. Run A/B tests on your next five sends and actually use the data. Check your sender reputation too. A dirty sender reputation lands you in spam regardless of how good your subject line is.
Also: segment your list. Sending the same email to your entire list is why your open rate looks like that. People who bought from you last week should not be getting the same email as people who haven't opened in six months.
If your CTR is below benchmark:
Your offer inside the email isn't compelling enough. One clear call-to-action outperforms three competing buttons every single time. The paradox of choice is real. Give people one thing to do.
Check mobile rendering too. Over 60% of emails are opened on phones. If your layout breaks or your CTA button is tiny, clicks evaporate before they happen.
If your unsubscribe rate is above 0.2%:
You're probably emailing too often or to the wrong people. Pull back on cadence. Fix segmentation. And look at your welcome sequence, because that's where expectations get set. If those expectations are off from the start, unsubscribes begin on day one.
The goal isn't to hit the industry average. Average is where brands go to become irrelevant. The goal is to be meaningfully above it, consistently.
FAQ
What is a good email open rate?
It depends entirely on your industry and which data source you're using. With Apple's MPP inflating numbers, most brands now see 30-40%+ opens reported. A better approach: compare yourself to your own historical performance and your specific industry average, not the all-industry number.
What is a good click-through rate for email?
The all-industry average is around 2-2.6%. Education and non-profits typically see 3-4%+. Ecommerce and retail tend to land below average at 1-2%. Above 2.5% is solid in most categories. Under 1% means something about your content, list, or segmentation needs fixing.
How does industry affect email benchmarks?
Audience intent. Someone who signed up for a nonprofit newsletter wants to be there. Someone who entered their email for a discount code does not. How your list was built determines how engaged it will be, which flows into every metric you track.
Are open rate benchmarks still accurate?
Partially. Apple's Mail Privacy Protection has inflated open rates for any sender with a significant Apple Mail audience. The absolute numbers are less reliable than they used to be. Use click-to-open rate and raw click rates as your primary engagement signals.
What should I track instead of open rates?
Click-to-open rate, revenue per email, and unsubscribe rate per campaign. Open rate tells you if your subject line and deliverability are working. CTOR tells you if your content is working. Revenue per email tells you if any of it actually matters to the business.