Email Open Rates By Industry (& Other Top Email Benchmarks)

Ever wonder how your email marketing results compare to others in your industry? Or the average email open rates you should aim for? That makes two of us.

During my time as a marketer at HubSpot, I was often tasked with sending emails to customers, so I always wanted to make sure my click rate stayed competitive. Knowing how my performance stacked up against industry standards helped me devise winning strategies for more conversions.

Compiling email marketing benchmarks from multiple sources is a time-consuming process, though. But I’ve gone through it, so you don’t have to. Now, you can leverage these stats to optimize your email marketing campaigns.

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I initially attributed this to varying user behaviors across these platforms. But when I sleuthed further, I discovered there’s more to these figures.

Your target countries and email message types also influence open rates. For instance, if I send newsletters and transactional emails to my target audience, I may find that the latter achieves a higher open rate because they contain personalized information a person may need to access immediately.

After collecting data from top email marketing vendors, I made this graphic to give you a quick snapshot of the average email open rates across industries, message types, and countries.

With these open rates benchmarked by different factors from message type to location, what should you consider a good open rate? I’ll answer that next.

What is a Good Email Open Rate?

A good email open rate varies depending on your industry, audience, and message type. I’d deem an open rate solid when it hits or exceeds 20% — and most of my colleagues agree.

But remember, what works for my business might not work for yours. Email deliverability, offering, target audience, and current market trends can all affect your open rate.

That’s why I’m always up to date on my industry’s average email open rate. It tells me when my marketing effort is good enough or subpar. Irrespective of these figures, though, I’ve learned to improve my email marketing metrics over time.

My first step in improving any campaign is monitoring it for trends and opportunities. However, over the years, I’ve realized that manual performance tracking can be a productivity and conversion killer. So, I use HubSpot’s free email tracking tool to do the heavy lifting.

Email Marketing Benchmarks

Your industry’s average email open rate is only one of several email marketing benchmarks. I also track click-through, bounce, unsubscribe, and click-to-open rates (CTOR) for a complete picture of my campaign’s performance.

Top email marketing platforms release email marketing benchmarks every year or two. So, I audit my email campaign efforts based on these standards. This year, I looked at benchmarks from five industry leaders that used substantial email marketing data to prepare their reports:

Mailchimp used over a billion emails sent from their servers.
Constant Contact analyzed over 200 million emails.
Mailerlite used over 7.6 million emails from 764,000 campaigns.
Omnisend collected data from over 100,000 customers.
GetResponse analyzed approximately seven billion messages.

Let’s get right into the details.

Average Email Open Rates by Industry

Wondering what’s a decent open rate for your industry? Check out the table below for email marketing benchmarks from top vendors.

Data sources: Constant Contact, Mailerlite, Omnisend, Mailchimp, and GetResponse.

*Other or Unknown: A catch-all used during sign up if the customer doesn’t fit into any of the listed categories.

Unique Data: Average Email Open Rates by Industry

Check out the average email open rates for these industries as they appear on popular email marketing platforms.

Key Takeaways: Average Email Open Rates

I get the most value from email open rates when I use them as a comparative metric. For instance, I’d take this week’s email open rates and compare them to last week’s using the same audience and similar conditions. This experiment helps me to understand how my email performance compares to industry benchmarks.

Interestingly, I discovered a pattern — people are more likely to open your emails if they consider you charitable or authoritative. This explains why governmental, religious, and nonprofit organizations enjoy some of the highest open rates.

Pro tip: The best way to improve a low open rate is by following email subject line best practices, tracking performance, and optimizing based on results.

To summarize the data in the table above, here are the average email open rates across 11 industries.

1. What is the average email open rate for electronics companies?

The average open rate for electronics companies is 33.88%. This covers computer games, hardware, consumer electronics, and more.

2. What is the average email open rate in the business industry?

The average open rate in the business industry is 34.30%, covering consulting, freelancing, marketing, and finance.

3. What is the average email open rate for software companies?

The software industry’s average open rate is 35.92%, encompassing fintech and health tech businesses.

4. What is the average email open rate for media companies?

The average open rate for media is 35.46%. News subscriptions and advertising platforms fall under this category.

5. What is the average email open rate for internet and telecom companies?

The open rate for the internet and telecom companies averages 39.96%. This includes ISP newsletters, mobile carrier promotions, and VoIP service updates.

6. What is the average email open rate for healthcare companies?

The healthcare industry’s average open rate is 37.39%, dropping to 34.64% when you include fitness companies such as gyms.

7. What is the average email open rate for retail and shopping companies?

The retail category’s average open rate is 35.90%, encompassing retail ecommerce stores and home goods suppliers.

8. What is the average email open rate for finance companies?

Finance businesses like investment advisories, tax services, and banking have an average open rate of 26.48%.

9. What is the average email open rate for manufacturing companies?

Manufacturing companies, including steel, automotive, and component producers, have an average email open rate of 32.03%.

10. What is the average email open rate for real estate companies?

Real estate businesses, including brokerages, property management firms, and realtors, have a 37.18% average email open rate.

11. What is the average email open rate for education companies?

The education sector’s average email open rate is 37.35%, encompassing e-learning platforms, universities, schools, and educational program developers.

Average Email Click-Through Rates by Industry

Click-through rate measures the percentage of people who clicked a link in your email campaign out of everyone who received the email but didn’t necessarily open it. See the charts and table below for industry CTR benchmarks across top email marketing platforms.

Data sources: Constant Contact, Mailerlite, Omnisend, Mailchimp, and GetResponse

Unique Data: Average Email Click-Through Rates by Industry

Some industries are unique to each email marketing platform. Check out these charts to see the average email CTR on these platforms.

Key Takeaways: Average Email Click-Through Rates

Click-through rate is usually the first answer I get when I ask an email marketer what metrics they track. Interestingly, it’s a metric I love tracking. It’s one of the greatest indicators that my email marketing effort is paying off.

Similar to email open rate, the average click-through rate varies across email marketing platforms. It ranges between 1.5% and 3.01%, thanks to a number of factors. Email deliverability tops the list.

I’ve played around with several email marketing platforms and discovered that they all have different deliverability rates. So, before I invest in any platform, I usually do my research to verify whether or not my emails will make it to the recipient’s inbox.

These are the average click-through rates that email marketing platforms reported over the past year:

Constant Contact — 2%
Mailerlite — 3.01%
Omnisend — 1.5%
Mailchimp — 2.66%
GetResponse — 2.89%

So, the average click-through rate across these platforms is 2.41%.

Pro tip: Following CTR best practices can boost your email marketing performance. If you don’t want your messages to get lost in a customer’s inbox, you’ll follow these tips as closely as I do.

Average Email Bounce Rates by Industry

As much as I want my messages to always reach everyone on my email list, I understand that this isn’t entirely within my control. That’s where email bounce rate comes in. It tells me the percentage of my messages that didn’t make it to recipients’ inboxes. If you’re new to email marketing, use this guide to calculate your bounce rate.

You can have a soft or hard bounce.

Soft bounces occur when the target email address is temporarily unreachable. Your message eventually reaches the recipient after multiple retries.
Hard bounces result from invalid, closed, or non-existent email addresses.

Too many hard bounces make you look like a bad marketer to email servers. The result? Your messages will most likely end up in recipients’ spam folders. To minimize hard bounces, I use double opt-in (making users confirm their subscription twice) when collecting email addresses.

Tracking your bounce rate can help you maintain a healthy email list. Plus, you’ll remain trustworthy in the eyes of email service providers — a double win for you.

I’ve curated email marketing benchmarks for bounce rates across industries to guide you through the process.

Data sources: Constant Contact, Mailerlite, Omnisend, Mailchimp, and GetResponse.

Unique Data: Average Email Bounce Rates by Industry

Some industries only appeared in certain vendors’ reports. Here’s all the unique data I could find.

Key Takeaways: Average Email Bounce Rates

When compiling these stats, Constant Contact caught my eye. Sadly, not for good reason. At 10.29%, this email marketing platform has the highest bounce rate among its peers.

I see two possibilities here: the platform either has a lower reputation among email servers, or its users collect more bad email addresses than competitors. Then again, it could be both.

You want to grow your email list. And so do I. But at what cost? If you’re so caught up with trying to get more subscribers, there’s a chance you might let invalid emails slip through. Liviu Tanase, CEO of ZeroBounce, sheds light on this:

“Invalid, abusive, and temporary emails will affect your sender reputation, so it’s best to weed them out … Emailing only valid and active addresses allows you to connect with people who care about your brand, and that’s what every email marketer wants.”

Constant Contact is an industry leader, no doubt. But I’d rather not take chances, so I use HubSpot’s email marketing tools to manage campaigns because they’re more user-friendly than the others I’ve tried.

Pro tip: Regardless of the tools you use, always prune your list of inactive subscribers and bad email addresses to lower bounce rates.

Average Click-to-Open Rates by Industry

Click-to-open rate measures the percentage of people who clicked on a link within my email after opening it. I analyzed the click-to-open rates on Mailerlite, Omnisend, and GetResponse. Here’s what I found.

Data sources: Mailerlite, Omnisend, and GetResponse

marketing platforms.

Unique Data: Average Email Click-To-Open Rates by Industry

What’s a good click-to-open rate for your industry? Find out in the charts below.

Key Takeaways: Average Email Click-to-Open Rates

A high click-to-open rate is within your reach, especially if you’re in the finance, tech, construction, manufacturing, and blogging industries. I kept tabs on these industries and discovered that their average click-to-open rates have remained consistently high over the past months, averaging 13.47%. With the software and web industry, though, the click-to-open rate lingers around 2.3%.

People who click are likely to convert. If they don’t convert immediately, I’d follow up and offer incentives to attract them.

Pro tip: Set up email tracking to see how many times people interact with your email. The higher the engagement, the higher their likelihood of converting.

Average Conversion Rates by Industry

Conversion rate measures the total percentage of recipients who take a desired action, such as purchasing a product or signing up for a newsletter. Check out recent stats from Omnisend.

Average Click-to-Conversion Rates by Industry

Click-to-conversion rate measures the percentage of recipients who click on a link within a message and complete the desired action. Find your industry in the chart below.

Average Unsubscribe Rates by Industry

I saved this one for last because it’s my favorite metric. Unsubscribe rate measures the total percentage of subscribers who no longer want to receive your messages.

This metric reveals patterns that help me understand the kind of messages my subscribers want and how frequently they want to receive these messages. While I couldn’t find much info on Omnisend and Constant Contact, other platforms like Mailerlite, Mailchimp, and GetResponse provided recent stats.

Data sources: Mailerlite, Mailchimp, and GetResponse

Unique Data: Average Email Unsubscribe Rates by Industry

Let’s break down average email unsubscribe rates as they appear on each of these email marketing platforms.

Key Takeaways: Average Email Unsubscribe Rates

Although the average unsubscribe rate across industries ranges from 0.06% to 0.43%, those numbers don’t always tell the whole story.

As much as it breaks my heart to lose a subscriber, I appreciate the clarity provided when someone officially opts out of my email list. Over time, I’ve noticed that some subscribers quietly disengage. They just stop opening emails, and even if they accidentally do, they don’t click on any links. Still, there are others who mark new messages as spam without opening them.

In some cases, you can’t blame them. I’m also wary of opening messages I don’t need. For example, I might opt out of a student newsletter because I’ve graduated from college. I might even mark messages as spam if the subject lines are too salesy. I’ve learned not to stress too much about unsubscribe rates. Instead, I focus on creating engaging email content that provides value to my audience.

Email Click-Through Rate Statistics and Best Practices

Over the years, I have fine-tuned my email marketing strategy and adopted best practices to boost click-through rates.

Here are some stats I base my strategies on:

The best time to send emails is between 9 AM and 3 PM. (HubSpot Blog Research, 2023).
Marketers across the U.S. think Tuesday is the best day to send emails; next is Monday, then Thursday, according to 27%, 19%, and 17% of respondents, respectively. (HubSpot Blog Research, 2023).
According to 48.2% of marketers, personalization improves click-through rates the most, while 36.5% attribute that improvement to creating effective subject lines. (HubSpot Blog Research, 2022).
Based on data from Constant Contact, Mailerlite, Omnisend, Mailchimp, and GetResponse, the average click-through rate across industries is 2.64%.
About 52.9% of marketers believe that email segmentation improves click-through rates (HubSpot Blog Research, 2022).
Subscribers prefer value-based emails, as 30.7% of marketers report that product/feature announcements and special offers generate the highest click-through rates. (HubSpot Blog Research, 2022).

Our ultimate list of email marketing stats offers even more useful insights to help you refine your strategy for improved performance.

Frequently Asked Questions About Email Subject Lines

I’ve outlined recurring questions email marketing buffs ask me online and offline. My answers will help you boost performance based on these email benchmarks.

How do I improve my email open rates?

Tailor your subject line to your prospects. For example, if my audience loves sailing, I’d try “Ahoy, fellow sailor! ⛵ Question about Company X?” with the emoji or “Smooth sailing ahead: A query about Company X.” Yes, it’s cheesy but surprisingly impactful.

What are the best practices for email subject lines?

Here are some of my most effective ways to get the click:

Keep it short and sweet. Fewer words make your subject line easier to understand.
Tailor it to the recipient. Research, research, research. Chip in a phrase or word to show that your email contains things that interest your audience.
Tell your audience what to expect. If recipients know what to expect, they’ll be more likely to open your message.
Don’t use all caps or overuse exclamation points. An outreach email is never life or death, so a subject line that says “IMPORTANT!!!” will only hurt your credibility and make you seem desperate.

Read this blog post for 23 simple tips on improving your open rate.

What are examples of great email subject lines?

Not to beat a dead horse, but personalization is my proven key to email marketing success.

Here are some examples to inspire you:

“Aja, interested in the new Google rankings data?”
“Cal Poly connection.”
“My favorite part of your recent article.”
“Identified some content opportunities for you.”

If you love these examples, then you’ll enjoy exploring our ultimate list of 150+ awesome subject lines for your campaigns.

How do I personalize subject lines?

I personalize my subject lines by using the email recipient’s name or company name, mentioning someone they know, or referring to a personal tidbit about them.

Boost Your Email Conversion Rate with Holistic Performance Tracking

As the digital landscape continues to evolve, industry averages shine as guiding stars for marketers like us. When I sifted through key data from top email marketing vendors, I saw beyond numbers. I saw growth opportunities.

I’ve also realized that true success isn’t just about hitting a magic number. It’s more about driving real results through targeted campaigns. So, if you want to take your email marketing to the next level, staying updated on email marketing benchmarks is a giant stride in the right direction.

Editor’s note: This post was originally published in June 2023 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.

Join me in uncovering the latest email marketing benchmarks to discover the industry standards for open, click-through, unsubscribe and hard bounce rates.