Email marketing · Benchmarks
Published averages run from about 30% to over 50% depending on industry, but Apple’s privacy feature inflates them, so judge campaigns on clicks and results.
Averages: roughly 35% to 45% opens
Clicks matter more than opens
Compare against your own history
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Published email campaign open rate benchmarks currently sit roughly between 30% and 55%, depending on industry and data source. Mailchimp’s benchmark across all users is a 35.63% open rate, 2.62% click rate and 0.22% unsubscribe rate, based on its data as of December 2023. MailerLite’s 2025 benchmarks, covering December 2024 to November 2025, put the median open rate at 43.46%, the click rate at 2.09% and the unsubscribe rate at 0.22%.
Treat open rates with caution. Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection downloads email content in the background whether or not someone reads the message, which records many unread emails as opened. Click rate, conversions and revenue are more reliable measures of whether a campaign worked.
Industry matters more than any overall average. Two published sources, side by side:
All users: 35.63% open, 2.62% click. Nonprofits: 40.04% open, 3.27% click. Education and training: 35.64% open, 3.02% click. Business and finance: 31.35% open, 2.78% click. E-commerce: 29.81% open, 1.74% click.
All accounts: 43.46% open, 2.09% click, 6.81% click-to-open. Nonprofit: 52.38% open, 2.90% click. Legal: 42.58% open, 4.90% click. E-commerce: 32.67% open, 1.07% click. Religion: 55.71% open, 2.95% click.
The pattern is consistent: nonprofits, community and hobby lists open more; e-commerce opens and clicks less, because stores send more often and much of it is promotional. Mailchimp counts only campaigns sent to at least 1,000 subscribers where the user reported an industry. MailerLite reports medians across 3.6 million campaigns. Different methods produce different numbers, which is why you should never compare yourself to a single figure.
Platforms calculate these rates slightly differently, so check the definitions before comparing. In general:
An illustrative worked example: you send to 2,000 people, 40 bounce, so 1,960 are delivered. If 780 open, 45 click and 4 unsubscribe, your open rate is about 39.8%, your click rate about 2.3% and your unsubscribe rate about 0.2%. That is close to both published averages. If 300 of those 780 opens came from Apple’s background loading, the real open rate is nearer 24%, which is why the click rate is the number to trust.
An open is recorded when a tiny invisible image in the email loads. Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection routes that content through relays and downloads it in the background by default, regardless of whether the person engages with the email, according to Apple. The sender sees an open that may never have happened.
The effects:
Both Mailchimp and MailerLite note this effect in their benchmark pages. Some platforms can flag or filter likely machine opens; check your platform’s reporting settings.
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Work through the likely causes in this order:
JLB USA has run marketing for growing businesses for more than 15 years. Our email marketing team works on MailChimp, Klaviyo and HubSpot, and reports on clicks, conversions and revenue rather than opens alone. If email traffic lands on a weak page, our conversion rate optimization tips cover what to fix on the site side.
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Published benchmarks range from about 30% to over 50% by industry. Mailchimp’s all-user average is 35.63% and MailerLite’s 2025 median is 43.46%. Compare against your own history and your industry, and remember Apple privacy features inflate opens.
Mailchimp’s all-user average is 2.62% and MailerLite’s 2025 median is 2.09%. E-commerce runs lower; nonprofit and legal lists often run higher.
Often because more of your subscribers use Apple Mail with Mail Privacy Protection, which loads emails in the background and records them as opened.
Both Mailchimp and MailerLite report an average of 0.22% per campaign. A single send far above that is worth investigating.
Yes, as a rough trend and for spotting delivery problems, but judge campaigns on clicks, conversions and revenue.
