Your open rate is lying to you, and the industry average you’re comparing it to isn’t much more honest. Chase the wrong number and you’ll spend months rewriting subject lines that were never the problem while the subscribers who actually pay you go quiet.
Whether a number is “good” depends on your industry, where your list came from and how many of your subscribers read in Apple Mail with Privacy Protection switched on. Vendor benchmarks describe the vendor’s own customers, which is why I’d never let one set your target, including the GetResponse numbers below. (Disclosure: I was GetResponse’s U.S. Brand Evangelist from 2024 to 2025.)
Here are the two most recent large datasets: MailerLite’s 2025 benchmarks (more than 3.6 million campaigns from 181,000 accounts, sent December 2024 to November 2025) and GetResponse’s benchmark report (averages from more than 4.4 billion messages sent by its customers in 2023). Use them as reference points, and judge yourself on clicks and revenue. Figures were checked against both source pages on October 19, 2026.
What are the email marketing benchmarks across all industries?
| Metric | MailerLite 2025 | GetResponse (2023 data, average) |
|---|---|---|
| Open rate | 43.46% | 39.64% |
| Click rate | 2.09% | 3.25% |
| Click-to-open rate | 6.81% | 8.62% |
| Unsubscribe rate | 0.22% | 0.15% |
| Bounce rate | Not reported | 2.33% |
MailerLite’s page labels its headline figures both as averages and as medians, so I treat them as “MailerLite’s 2025 benchmark” rather than either. The bigger warning is that these are platform-wide figures. Comparing your beauty ecommerce brand to the all-industries number is meaningless: in MailerLite’s data, beauty and personal care has one of the lowest click rates (0.95%) while legal has the highest (4.90%). The average tells you nothing about whether you’re winning.
Email marketing benchmarks by industry
Open rates by industry from MailerLite’s 2025 benchmarks:
| Industry | Open rate |
|---|---|
| Religion | 55.71% |
| Non-profit | 52.38% |
| Health and fitness | 47.81% |
| Media | 42.97% |
| Software and web app | 39.31% |
| Retail | 37.47% |
| Marketing and advertising | 37.23% |
| Publishing company | 34.24% |
| Travel and transportation | 30.1% |
Click rates spread just as widely: legal (4.90%), manufacturing (4.22%) and media (4.10%) lead, while politics (0.83%), beauty and personal care (0.95%) and restaurants and cafes (1.06%) trail. The full 46-industry tables are on MailerLite’s benchmark page.
Why open rate is broken as a metric
Apple launched Mail Privacy Protection in 2021. For people who turn it on, Apple Mail loads the tracking image in the background, so the email is recorded as opened whether or not anyone read it. The more of your list uses Apple Mail, the more your open rate is inflated.
That’s why I judge on click rate. Mail Privacy Protection can’t inflate a click; someone had to choose to follow the link, and if you’re still A/B testing subject lines on opens, you’re testing noise.
If your subject line lift shows up in opens but not in clicks, it didn’t lift anything that pays you. Judge every test on the click.
— Carlos Gil, Founder & Editor, The Best NetworkAutomated emails beat broadcasts
Emails people trigger themselves land at the moment of highest intent. GetResponse’s 2023 data shows it: newsletters averaged a 40.08% open rate, triggered emails 45.38%, autoresponders 51.05% and welcome emails 83.63%.
So set up a welcome series before you optimize anything else. See my welcome email guide for the templates, and the best ESPs for automation if your current platform makes this hard.
What to do if you're below benchmark
Diagnose in this order:
- Deliverability. If a chunk of your list never sees your emails, no metric will look normal. Check spam placement first. See my deliverability guide and our picks for the best platforms for deliverability.
- List quality. Where did the subscribers come from? Purchased lists, contest signups, and non incentivized bulk signups all underperform. Verifying old or imported lists with a tool like Bouncer removes dead addresses that drag every rate down; our list cleaning guide walks through it.
- Sender name and reputation. Are you sending from a person or a brand? From a warmed domain or a new one?
- Subject line style. Are you writing subject lines that look like marketing or subject lines that look like a person?
- Content and offer. Are you delivering on the promise of the signup? A subscriber who opted in for a discount code doesn’t want your founder story on email 1.
The one benchmark that actually matters
Revenue per subscriber per month. Everything else is a proxy: open rate, click rate, unsubscribe rate and conversion rate matter only because they roll up into that number.
There’s no reliable cross-industry benchmark for it, because it depends on your prices and margins, so compare it with your own history. Track it monthly. If it’s flat while your list grows, your list is getting stale. If it’s falling, something is wrong across the board, and the diagnosis order above is where you start. For what email returns overall, see our email marketing ROI statistics.
Open rates flatter you. Industry averages comfort you. Revenue per subscriber is the only benchmark your bank account recognizes.
Sources
MailerLite’s 2025 benchmarks put the all-industries open rate at 43.46% across more than 3.6 million campaigns; GetResponse reports a 39.64% average from its 2023 data. Both are inflated by Apple Mail Privacy Protection, so treat open rate as directional and use click rate as your real engagement metric.
MailerLite’s 2025 all-industries click rate is 2.09%, ranging from 0.83% (politics) to 4.90% (legal) by industry. GetResponse reports a 3.25% average click-through rate from its 2023 data. Automated emails such as welcome series typically beat broadcast averages, so compare broadcasts with broadcasts.
MailerLite’s 2025 unsubscribe rate is 0.22% per campaign; GetResponse reports 0.15%. Even the highest-industry rate in MailerLite’s data was 0.40%. A rate well above that usually points to list quality, frequency, or content that doesn’t match what people signed up for.
A lot. In MailerLite’s 2025 data, open rates run from 30.1% (travel and transportation) to 55.71% (religion), with non-profits at 52.38%, software and web apps at 39.31% and retail at 37.47%. Compare yourself to your own industry, not the all-industries average.
Yes. For people who turn it on, Apple Mail loads tracking images in the background, so opens are recorded whether or not the person read the email. How much that inflates your numbers depends on how many of your subscribers use Apple Mail. Trust click rate more, and judge subject line tests on clicks.
Monthly at minimum, and weekly if you send more than twice a week. Track trend lines, not single sends. One bad send is noise; three bad sends in a row is a signal worth diagnosing, starting with deliverability and list quality before you touch subject lines or content.