Benchmarks — Email
Email marketing benchmarks: open, click & unsubscribe
Competitive open rate sits between 15% and 30% for a consumer list and 25% to 45% for a B2B nurture list. Click and unsubscribe rates move the same way. Here's the full grade by list type.
Open rate
An opted-in newsletter or promotional list, sent to regularly (ecommerce, retail, consumer brands).
Tap the band you sit in and it follows you around the benchmarks.
| Grade | Range | What it means |
|---|---|---|
| Developing | Under 15% | Sign of list fatigue, poor subject lines, or a list that hasn't been cleaned in a long time. |
| Competitive | 15% to 30% | Normal range for a consumer list sent to on a regular schedule. |
| Leading | 30% and above | Strong engagement, usually built on a genuinely useful send cadence and a list that's been kept clean. |
Click rate
An opted-in newsletter or promotional list, sent to regularly (ecommerce, retail, consumer brands).
Tap the band you sit in and it follows you around the benchmarks.
| Grade | Range | What it means |
|---|---|---|
| Developing | Under 1% | People are opening but not acting. Usually a call-to-action or offer problem, not an open-rate problem. |
| Competitive | 1% to 2.5% | Normal click rate (of total sends) for a consumer promotional list. |
| Leading | 2.5% and above | Strong. Usually one clear offer per email rather than several competing ones. |
Unsubscribe rate
Lower is Leading here. The bands run the opposite direction to open and click rate.
An opted-in newsletter or promotional list, sent to regularly (ecommerce, retail, consumer brands).
| Grade | Range | What it means |
|---|---|---|
| Leading | Under 0.2% | Healthy. The send frequency and content match what people signed up for. |
| Competitive | 0.2% to 0.5% | Normal background churn for an actively-sent consumer list. |
| Developing | Above 0.5% | Worth checking send frequency and whether the list was built with genuine opt-in or bought or scraped. |
What moves the bands
List type
Transactional emails (receipts, order confirmations) run open rates of 60% or higher and shouldn't be counted in your marketing benchmarks at all. Compare marketing sends to marketing sends only.
Send frequency
Lists sent to too often burn out and unsubscribe faster. Lists sent to too rarely forget who you are and stop opening. Both show up as the same symptom: declining engagement over time.
List hygiene
A list that's never been cleaned of hard bounces and long-dead subscribers will report artificially low open rates even if your actual engaged audience is healthy.
Segmentation
The same email sent to everyone will always underperform the same email sent to a segment it's actually relevant to. This is usually the single biggest lever on click rate.
How we set these bands
How we set these bands
These bands are set from running email programs for Australian clients across consumer, B2B and newly-built lists, calibrated against the major published benchmark studies. Those studies disagree with each other by 10 to 20 points on open rate depending on methodology. That disagreement is the strongest evidence that a single point average is the wrong way to report this metric. We publish ranges.
The bands hold against the major studies. Campaign Monitor's global averages (21.5% open, 2.3% click) fall inside our consumer bands. Klaviyo's 2026 ecommerce data puts clicks at 1.69%, inside our band, with opens at 31%, marginally above our ceiling. The difference is measurement, not performance: Apple Mail's privacy protection registers opens automatically and inflates the reported figure. Lists with heavy Apple Mail readership should weight click rate over open rate when grading.
Our take
Our take
Email is the one channel you actually own. You're not renting attention from a platform's algorithm. That makes list health the whole game. A smaller, engaged list that opens and clicks beats a bigger list that's gone quiet, every time.
Most businesses treat unsubscribes as a bad thing to avoid. They're not. A clean list that sheds people who were never going to buy reports better numbers and sends cheaper than a bloated one you're scared to clean.
Frequently asked
Competitive sits between 15% and 30% for a consumer list and 25% to 45% for a B2B nurture list. Above those ranges is strong. Transactional emails (receipts, shipping updates) run far higher and shouldn't be blended into your marketing list's open rate.
Related
Marketing Dictionary
Industry benchmarks on Atlas
A list is an asset. Read it like one.
These bands tell you what typical looks like. Our take reads your actual send history and list health against it.
Get our take