Email Marketing Benchmarks for 2026: What Good Actually Looks Like

The all industries averages (with a warning)

Across every industry combined, 2026 averages look like this:

• Open rate: 39.7%
• Click through rate: 2.8%
• Click to open rate: 7.1%
• Unsubscribe rate: 0.27%
• Bounce rate: 0.9%

Now the warning. These numbers are averages of averages. Comparing your beauty ecommerce brand to the "all industries" average is meaningless. Beauty gets 30% opens. B2B SaaS gets 25%. Nonprofits get 50%. The average tells you nothing about whether you are winning.

Benchmarks by industry

Real numbers by vertical for 2026:

Retail and ecommerce

Open rate 30 to 35%. Click rate 2 to 3%. Conversion rate on promotional sends 1 to 2%. Cart abandonment sequences convert at 8 to 15%.

B2B SaaS

Open rate 25 to 32%. Click rate 3 to 5%. Conversion to demo or trial 0.5 to 1.5%. Longer sequences work better than one off pitches.

Nonprofits and advocacy

Open rate 45 to 55%. Click rate 3 to 5%. Donation conversion 0.5 to 2%. Highest engagement of any category, largely because subscribers self select more deliberately.

Creators and newsletters

Open rate 40 to 60%. Click rate 4 to 8%. Sponsorship revenue $30 to $80 CPM at 25K+ engaged subscribers.

Media and publishing

Open rate 35 to 45%. Click rate 5 to 10%. Higher click rates because the entire product is clicks to articles.

Financial services

Open rate 25 to 30%. Click rate 1 to 2%. Lowest engagement of any category, driven by compliance requirements that make emails feel corporate.

Why open rate is broken as a metric

Apple launched Mail Privacy Protection in 2021. It marks emails as opened regardless of whether the recipient actually opened them. By 2026, roughly 40 to 50% of the average marketer's list opens in Apple Mail with MPP on.

That means your reported open rate is 8 to 12 percentage points higher than the true number.

I stopped using open rate as a performance metric two years ago. I look at click rate. Click rate cannot be faked by a privacy setting. Someone actually had to move their finger.

If you are still A/B testing subject lines based on open rate, you are testing noise.

Automated sequences beat broadcasts every time

Broadcast emails are the average. Automated emails outperform them by 3 to 5x on every metric.

Welcome sequences: 50 to 80% opens, 10 to 20% clicks. See my welcome email guide for the templates.

Abandoned cart: 45 to 60% opens, 8 to 15% clicks, 5 to 10% recovery rate on the revenue that would have been lost.

Post purchase: 40 to 55% opens, 5 to 10% clicks. Highest lifetime value driver in ecommerce.

Re engagement: 15 to 25% opens on the initial send, but 60 to 80% of those opens click. Small number of engaged subscribers, high intent.

If your ESP does not do great automation, you are leaving money on the floor. See the best ESPs for automation.

What to do if you're below benchmark

Diagnose in this order:

1. Deliverability. If a chunk of your list never sees your emails, no metric will look normal. Check spam placement first. See my deliverability guide.
2. List quality. Where did the subscribers come from? Purchased lists, contest signups, and non incentivized bulk signups all underperform.
3. Sender name and reputation. Are you sending from a person or a brand? From a warmed domain or a new one?
4. Subject line style. Are you writing subject lines that look like marketing or subject lines that look like a person?
5. Content and offer. Are you delivering on the promise of the signup? A subscriber who opted in for a discount code does not 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, conversion rate. They all matter only because they roll up into revenue per subscriber.

In ecommerce, healthy is $1 to $3 per subscriber per month. In B2B SaaS with a proper attribution model, $5 to $20. In creator newsletters with sponsorship revenue, $0.50 to $2.

Track that one number monthly. If it is going up, you are winning. If it is flat while your list grows, your list is getting stale. If it is going down, something is wrong across the board and you need to diagnose.