What are good vs bad open/click/conversion benchmarks?
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Industry benchmarks for email are everywhere and almost all of them are misleading in at least one way. The numbers that matter are the ones calibrated to your specific context: your industry, your send frequency, your audience, and your list acquisition method.
Open rate benchmarks
The oft-quoted figure is "above 20% is good." That was more meaningful before Apple's Mail Privacy Protection launched in 2021. Apple now pre-loads tracking pixels for Apple Mail users, which inflates open rates. If you have significant Apple Mail audience share, your open rate is probably overstated by 10 to 20 percentage points or more. Treat open rate as a directional signal, not a precise count. Compare your own trend over time rather than against industry numbers that may be measuring different things.
If you want a meaningful benchmark: newsletters and content emails typically see 30-50% open rates from healthy, engaged lists. Promotional and e-commerce emails run 15-25%. These are rough ranges. SaaS onboarding sequences and transactional mail run higher. Cold outreach runs much lower.
Click rate benchmarks
Click rate is more reliable than open rate because it requires an actual action. A click rate above 2% is generally considered solid for a newsletter or promotional send. E-commerce tends to run 1-3%. B2B and content-focused sends can run higher if the content is targeted well. Below 0.5% consistently suggests the content isn't resonating or the audience isn't matched well to what you're sending.
Click-to-open rate (CTOR) is more useful than raw click rate for measuring content effectiveness. It compares clicks to opens (not total delivered), so it removes delivery noise and shows you what proportion of people who saw the email actually engaged.
Conversion benchmarks
Conversion rate depends entirely on what you're asking people to do. A 1% purchase conversion is excellent for an e-commerce promo. A 1% conversion on a "start free trial" CTA for SaaS is underwhelming. Set benchmarks for conversion against your own historical data first, and compare to industry figures second.
If your benchmarks feel off and you're not sure whether you have a list problem or a content problem, the SOS hotline is free.
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