Do your email open rates match your industry’s open rates?
Emails sent from email marketing services have an average open rate of 34.75%. If your open rate is around this figure, your email marketing strategy is in line with the rest of the industry.
If your domain is not authenticated, you don’t segment your email list, and you don’t create engaging email content, you might receive a lower open rate than the rest of your industry.
In this post, I studied reports created by a handful of popular email marketing services and used them to calculate average open rates for over a dozen industries.
What is the average email open rate?
The average email open rate for all industries is 34.75%.
This figure is the average of the five email marketing reports I studied. Here are the original figures from each report:
| Source | Average Email Open Rate |
| Mailchimp | 35.63% |
| Mailerlite | 42.35% |
| Omnisend | 26.64% |
| Klaviyo | 37.93% |
| Brevo | 31.22% |
| Avg. of All Sources | 34.75% |
Average Email Open Rates by Industry
These are the average email open rates for multiple industries based on data from the five sources I studied:
| Industry | Average Email Open Rate |
| Architecture & Construction | 32.55% [1][2] |
| Arts & Artists | 39.86% [2] |
| Beauty, Personal Care & Health | 34.52% [1][2] |
| Business & Finance | 35.93% [2] |
| Ecommerce | 28.88% [2] |
| Education | 37.71% [2] |
| Electronics | 30.10% |
| Food & Drink | 37.18% [1][2] |
| Games | 33.99% [2] |
| Healthcare | 36.88% [2] |
| Home & Garden | 35.86% [2] |
| Manufacturing | 31.26% [2] |
| Professional Services | 35.19% [2} |
| Real Estate | 36.14% [2] |
| Retail | 34.32% [2] |
| Sports | 40.10%[2] |
| Telecommunications | 31.37% [2] |
| Toys & Hobbies | 39.76% [2] |
| Travel | 31.49% |
| Others | 37.20% [2] |
Sources: Mailchimp, Mailerlite, Omnisend, Klaviyo, and Brevo
[1]At least one source had more than one viable category for this industry. Their rates were combined to determine a new average open rate for the source.
[2]Not all sources had an open rate for this figure.
Note: Data sets for this table can be found at the bottom of this article.
Noteworthy Stats from These Tables
- The sports industry has the highest email open rate at an average rate of 40.10%.
- The e-commerce industry has the lowest email open rate at an average rate of 28.88%.
- The retail industry’s open rate, which is 34.32%, is 18.84% higher than the ecommerce industry’s open rate.
- Mailerlite’s average email open rate is 28.88% higher* on average than open rates from competing services.
Note: The average of Mailchimp, Omnisend, Klaviyo, and Brevo’s open rates is 32.86%. Mailerlite’s average open rate of 42.35% is a 28.88% increase from this figure.
How to Calculate Your Email Open Rate
Use this formula to calculate your own email open rate:
Open rate = (total opens ÷ total recipients) × 100
Example: Let’s say I have an email list with 1,037 subscribers. I sent out an email to all of them and around 370 opened it.
Here’s what my formula would look like:
Open rate = (370 ÷ 1,037) × 100
Quick math lesson: To use this formula, I’d divide 370 by 1,037. This equals 0.3567984570877531.
I’d then multiply that long number by 100, which equals 35.67984570877531.
Finally, I’d round to the nearest hundredth place to get 35.68, which means my open rate for this email was 35.68%.
If you’re able to see how many of the emails you send bounce, there’s a second formula you can use to remove bounced emails from your open rate:
Open rate = (total opens ÷ (total recipients – bounced emails)) × 100
So, if 50 of the 1,037 emails I sent bounced, my actual figure for total recipients would be 987 since 1,037 – 50 = 987.
This means my new formula would look like this:
Open rate = (370 ÷ 987) × 100
Bounced emails do not make it to your recipient’s mailbox at all (not even their spam folder), so it’s a good idea to remove this data from your formula so you can calculate a more accurate open rate.
How to Calculate Your Average Email Open Rate
Add all of the open rates from each campaign you’ve sent together, then divide that number by the total number of campaigns you sent.
Round to the nearest hundredth place to get your average email open rate.
Example: Let’s say I sent four campaigns, and these were their open rates:
- Campaign 1: 35.68%
- Campaign 2: 32.75%
- Campaign 3: 38.43%
- Campaign 4: 37.51%
If I add all of these numbers up, I get 144.37.
If I divide by the total number of campaigns, which is 4, I get 36.0925.
If I round to the nearest hundredth place, I get 36.10, which means my average email open rate is 36.10%.
An Easier Way to Determine Your Open Rate
If you use an email marketing service, such as Mailchimp, you can view your open rates without having to calculate them yourself.
The data that’s available to you and where that data is available is different for each service.
Even so, you should be able to open reports for individual campaigns as well as reports for your entire email list, all of which should list your open rate.
If you’re running cold email and outreach campaigns, you’ll need to use an email tracking service instead.
It’ll let you see how many have opened your email.
What is a good email open rate?
30% and higher is a good email open rate target to hit.
According to my sources, the average email open rate is 34.75%. This means if your open rates are around this figure, it’s pretty safe to say you have a good open rate.
You should also refer to the industry table in this article to ensure your open rates are in line with the rest of your industry.
Can you trust email open rates?
Unfortunately, open rates aren’t entirely accurate.
For one, they rely on images, so if you only create text-based emails, your open rates might appear a lot lower than they actually are.
Plus, if a recipient’s email client disables images from loading in emails, you won’t be able to track opens for that recipient.
Mailchimp solves this issue by “factoring click-throughs with open rates.” So, if a recipient clicks a link inside your email, Mailchimp will count that email as an open.
Another issue affecting the accuracy of open rates is Apple’s privacy protection that it enforces for Apple Mail users.
In September 2021, Apple released the Apple Mail Privacy Protection protocol, also referred to as “MPP.”
This protocol protects Apple Mail users from email tracking by masking recipient IP addresses and opening emails for users before they hit recipient inboxes.
This open will appear as a genuine open in your email marketing service or email tracking reports, even though the recipient didn’t really open the email themselves, yet.
Fortunately, most email marketing services allow you to exclude data from Apple Mail recipients in your reports.
How do open rates differ from click-to-open rates?
Open rate measures the percentage of recipients who opened your email out of the total number of recipients who received your email.
Click-to-open rate measures the percentage of recipients who clicked on a link in your email out of the total number of recipients who opened your email.
Click-to-open rate is most comparable to click-through rate.
While click-through rate measures the percentage of recipients who clicked on a link in your email out of the total number of recipients who received your email, the click-to-open rate only counts the number of recipients who opened your email.
This can make click-to-open rates more accurate for measuring clicks, as you can see in the table below.
These are the average click-to-open and click-through rates reported by the sources I included in this article:
| Click-to-Open | Click-Through | |
| Mailchimp | N/A | 2.62% |
| Mailerlite | 5.63% | 2.00% |
| Omnisend | 4.56% | 1.22% |
| Klaviyo | N/A | 1.29% |
| Brevo | 11.17% | 3.64% |
What Factors Affect Email Open Rates?
These factors affect your open rates:
- Email deliverability – Certain factors can lead to your emails landing in the spam folder, where they’re less likely to be opened.
- Relevance – The topics your emails are about don’t interest all of your subscribers, so few of them open them.
- Email subject line – Subject lines that aren’t engaging enough or appear spammy will be ignored.
- Email preview text – Leaving this blank lets your recipient get a peek at your email, so they don’t need to open it to know if it truly interests them.
- Timing – Sending emails at the wrong time can increase their likelihood of being ignored.
- Email content – When the types of emails you send to your recipients don’t interest them, they don’t bother opening them.
Use Segmentation to Increase Your Open Rates
The most important thing you can do to increase your open rates is segment your email list.
This strategy allows you to apply labels to your subscriber based on their interests and the actions they’ve taken while they’re subscribed to your email list.
For example, if you own a blog about fishing, you can organize subscribers into interest groups based on different types of fishing (fly fishing, ice fishing, etc.).
Related: How to Segment Your Email List with Tags
If your fishing blog is part of an online store, you can organize subscribers into groups like “Customers” and “Non-Customers.”
An easy way to organize your subscribers into interest groups is by promoting content upgrades with a lead generation tool like MailOptin, then integrating it with your email marketing service.
Email marketing services have marketing automations you can set up to segment your subscriber into a specific group based on the form they used to subscribe.
For example, if your subscriber subscribed to a popup promoting your content upgrade about fly fishing flies, you can add them to the “Fly Fishing” segment in your email list.
Now, when you set up an email campaign about fly fishing, you can choose to only send it to your Fly Fishing segment. When you set up an email campaign about ice fishing, you can exclude your Fly Fishing segment.
This makes your emails more relevant to your recipients, which will help increase your open rates overall. See also lead generation statistics for marketers.
Data Sets
Architecture & Construction
- Mailchimp – 31.08%
- Mailerlite – 38.24% | 41.35% (architecture and construction); 35.12% (construction)
- Omnisend – N/A
- Klaviyo – N/A
- Brevo – 28.32%
Arts & Artists
- Mailchimp – 42.17
- Mailerlite – 51.72 | 52.07% (art gallery and museum); 51.35% (artist)
- Omnisend – 30.9%
- Klaviyo – N/A
- Brevo – 34.66%
Beauty, Personal Care & Health
- Mailchimp – 32.11% | 31.90% (beauty and personal care); 37.07% (health and fitness); 27.35% (vitamin supplements)
- Mailerlite – 44.36% | 39.81% (beauty and personal care); 48.90% (health and fitness)
- Omnisend – 25.70% | 25.60% (beauty and cosmetics); 25.80% (health and wellness)
- Klaviyo – 35.90%
- Brevo – N/A
Business & Finance
- Mailchimp – 31.35%
- Mailerlite – 43.26%
- Omnisend – N/A
- Klaviyo – N/A
- Brevo – 33.18%
Ecommerce
- Mailchimp – 29.81%
- Mailerlite – 31.08%
- Omnisend – N/A
- Klaviyo – N/A
- Brevo – 25.74%
Education
- Mailchimp – 35.64%
- Mailerlite – 45.35% | 45.32% (educational institution); 45.37% (higher education)
- Omnisend N/A
- Klaviyo – N/A
- Brevo – 32.15%
Electronics
- Mailchimp – 26.98%
- Mailerlite – 31.43%
- Omnisend – 23.80%
- Klaviyo – 37.31%
- Brevo – 30.96%
Food & Drink
- Mailchimp – 39.03% | 38.02% (agriculture and food services); 40.03% (restaurant and venue)
- Mailerlite – 44.42% | 45.15% (agriculture and food services); 43.69% (restaurant)
- Omnisend – 26.10%
- Klaviyo – 39.15%
- Brevo – N/A
Games
- Mailchimp – 31.46%
- Mailerlite – 39.60%
- Omnisend – 30.90%
- Klaviyo – N/A
- Brevo – N/A
Healthcare
- Mailchimp – 34.65%
- Mailerlite – 44.60%
- Omnisend – N/A
- Klaviyo – N/A
- Brevo – 31.38%
Home & Garden
- Mailchimp – 35.69%
- Mailerlite – 41.13%
- Omnisend – 27.30%
- Klaviyo – 39.33%
- Brevo – N/A
Manufacturing
- Mailchimp – 29.08%
- Mailerlite – 32.65%
- Omnisend – N/A
- Klaviyo – N/A
- Brevo – 32.06%
Professional Services
- Mailchimp – 31.75% | 29.61% (consulting); 32.37% (creative services/agency); 29.71% (marketing and advertising); 32.74% (professional services); 33.69% (public relations); 32.40% (recruitment and staffing)
- Mailerlite – 43.50% | 38.89% (agency); 45.74% (consulting); 50.00% (creative services/agency); 39.05% (marketing and advertising); 41.75% (recruitment and staffing); 45.55% (public relations)
- Omnisend – N/A
- Klaviyo – N/A
- Brevo – 30.32%
Real Estate
- Mailchimp – 35.38%
- Mailerlite – 40.00%
- Omnisend – N/A
- Klaviyo – N/A
- Brevo – 33.04%
Retail
- Mailchimp – 35.05%
- Mailerlite – 37.50%
- Omnisend – N/A
- Klaviyo – 35.67%
- Brevo – 29.04%
Sports
- Mailchimp – 41.84%
- Mailerlite – 49.83%
- Omnisend – 28.80%
- Klaviyo – 39.90%
- Brevo – N/A
Telecommunications
- Mailchimp – 30.80% | 31.02% (mobile); 30.57% (telecommunications)
- Mailerlite – 33.02%
- Omnisend – N/A
- Klaviyo – N/A
- Brevo – 30.29%
Toys & Hobbies
- Mailchimp – 40.55%
- Mailerlite – 53.33%
- Omnisend – 26.10%
- Klaviyo – 39.06%
- Brevo – N/A
Travel & Transportation
- Mailchimp – 33.25%
- Mailerlite – 22.57%
- Omnisend – 30.35% | 32.50% (auto); 28.20% (travel)
- Klaviyo – 37.70%
- Brevo – 33.57% | 33.80% (hospitality and leisure); 33.34% (travel and tourism)
Others
- Mailchimp – N/A
- Mailerlite – 44.97%
- Omnisend – N/A
- Klaviyo – 36.72%
- Brevo – 29.90%
