What benchmarks should email marketers target and why?
Matthew Whittaker
Co-founder & CTO, Suped
Published 8 Jun 2025
Updated 16 Aug 2025
7 min read
Email marketers often find themselves looking for industry benchmarks for open rates, click-through rates, and other key performance indicators (KPIs). The desire to know "how we stack up" against competitors is natural, but relying too heavily on these averages can be a trap. While benchmarks offer a general idea of what's possible, they rarely tell the full story of your unique audience and campaign goals.
The challenge with broad industry benchmarks is that they often aggregate data across vastly different business models, audience types, and campaign objectives. A B2B software company sending highly targeted nurture emails will have different expectations than a retail brand sending daily promotional blasts. Blindly chasing an average can lead to misdirected efforts and missed opportunities for true improvement.
Instead of fixating on external averages, I believe the most effective approach for email marketers is to establish internal benchmarks. Your own historical data, segmented by campaign type, audience, and goal, provides a far more accurate and actionable baseline for performance. This strategy allows for continuous improvement tailored specifically to your operations and customer base.
Understanding key email metrics
When we talk about email marketing performance, several core metrics come to mind. These typically include open rate, click-through rate (CTR), and conversion rate. These are undoubtedly important, but their significance can vary depending on the specific goals of your campaign. For instance, a high open rate might indicate compelling subject lines, but if it doesn't translate into clicks or conversions, the engagement isn't truly impactful.
The click-to-open rate (CTOR) is often a more telling metric than the raw CTR. It measures the percentage of opens that result in a click, giving you a clearer picture of how engaging your email content is for those who actually opened it. A strong CTOR suggests your content and calls to action resonate with your audience.
Beyond engagement, crucial metrics also include bounce rate, complaint rate, and unsubscribe rate. These are critical indicators of list health and sender reputation. A high bounce rate, for example, can signal issues with your email list hygiene or even lead to your IP being added to an email blacklist (or blocklist). Similarly, high complaint rates can quickly damage your sender reputation with Internet Service Providers (ISPs), impacting your ability to reach the inbox. We’ve covered acceptable complaint rates previously.
Metric
What it measures
Why it's important
Open rate
Percentage of recipients who open your email.
Indicates subject line effectiveness and list engagement.
A common mistake I see marketers make is looking at a single, overarching industry benchmark and setting it as their target. The problem is that these averages can be deceptive. A benchmark report might tell you the average open rate for your industry is 20%, but this number masks the vast differences in list quality, sender reputation, content relevance, and campaign type that exist across companies within that same industry.
Consider the nuances, for example, between transactional emails (like order confirmations) and promotional emails. Transactional emails typically have significantly higher open and click rates because they are expected and highly relevant. Including them in a general industry average can inflate numbers and create unrealistic expectations for marketing campaigns. Similarly, a small, highly engaged niche list will naturally outperform a large, broad subscriber base.
Another pitfall is that industry benchmarks are often backward-looking. They reflect past performance across a wide data set, which might not account for recent changes in recipient behavior, privacy regulations, or email client updates. For instance, changes like Apple's Mail Privacy Protection (MPP) have significantly impacted how open rates are tracked, making older benchmarks less comparable.
Industry average
Broad applicability: Aggregates data from diverse companies, potentially masking specific performance trends.
Inaccurate comparison: Doesn't account for unique audience behavior, campaign types, or business objectives.
Outdated data: Often reflects past performance, not current market dynamics or privacy changes.
Internal performance
Specific to your brand: Uses your historical data to set realistic, actionable goals.
Contextual insights: Allows for segmentation by campaign, audience, and list health.
Tracks progress: Enables measuring improvement over time, regardless of external shifts.
How to set your own meaningful targets
Instead of aiming for a generic industry average, your primary target should always be continuous improvement over your own past performance. This means analyzing your metrics over time - month-over-month, quarter-over-quarter, and year-over-year. Tracking trends will give you the most accurate picture of your email program's health and effectiveness. For example, consistently improving your email deliverability KPIs is a much stronger indicator of success than hitting some arbitrary external benchmark.
To set meaningful targets, segment your email data. Look at specific campaign types, audience segments, and even individual customer journeys. For instance, a welcome series will likely have higher engagement rates than a monthly newsletter. By segmenting, you can identify what's working best for different parts of your audience and replicate those successes.
Focus on the metrics that directly align with your business objectives. If your goal is sales, conversion rate and revenue per email are paramount. If it's building brand loyalty, then long-term engagement metrics, like repeat opens and clicks over time, might be more relevant. This also ties into how opens should be used as a metric for email marketing in the modern landscape.
Setting effective internal benchmarks
Baseline performance: Establish a clear understanding of your current performance across all key metrics.
Segment your data: Analyze metrics by campaign type, audience segment, and even send frequency.
Focus on trends: Track metrics over time to identify improvements or declines in performance.
Align with goals: Prioritize KPIs that directly contribute to your business objectives, like revenue or customer retention.
Iterate and optimize: Use your insights to test new strategies and continuously improve your email program.
Deliverability and sender reputation
Ultimately, the numbers you see in your email reports are a reflection of your sender reputation and overall deliverability. Even if your content is brilliant, it won't matter if your emails aren't reaching the inbox. ISPs (Internet Service Providers) like Google and Yahoo use a complex array of signals to decide where your emails land: inbox, spam folder, or nowhere at all.
Key factors influencing deliverability include proper email authentication (SPF, DKIM, DMARC), consistent sending volume, low complaint rates, and low bounce rates. If your email program is struggling with these foundational elements, no amount of tweaking your subject lines will yield significant improvement. Ensuring your emails are authenticated with DMARC, SPF, and DKIM is a crucial first step.
Being on an email blacklist (or blocklist) can severely impact your deliverability. These lists track IPs and domains that have been associated with spamming activities. It's essential to monitor your sending reputation and address any issues promptly. Understand how email blacklists actually work and what to do if your domain or IP is listed to maintain a healthy email program.
Views from the trenches
Best practices
Continuously monitor your email engagement metrics, not just open rates and clicks, but also bounces and complaints to maintain list health.
Segment your audience precisely and tailor content to each segment, which naturally leads to higher relevance and engagement.
Focus on incremental improvements over your own historical data rather than chasing broad industry averages.
Regularly clean your email lists to remove inactive subscribers and invalid addresses, reducing bounce rates and improving deliverability.
Implement and maintain robust email authentication protocols, including SPF, DKIM, and DMARC, to build sender trust.
Common pitfalls
Setting unrealistic targets based on generic industry benchmarks that don't account for your specific audience or campaign type.
Neglecting deliverability fundamentals, like list hygiene and authentication, which directly impact inbox placement regardless of content quality.
Over-focusing on vanity metrics (like high open rates) without connecting them to actual business outcomes and conversions.
Ignoring negative feedback loops, such as high unsubscribe or complaint rates, which are crucial indicators of audience dissatisfaction.
Sending emails without a clear call-to-action (CTA) or purpose, leading to low engagement and wasted effort.
Expert tips
Regularly analyze trends in your email performance data, comparing current results to trailing 3, 6, and 12-month periods.
Understand that ISPs prioritize user experience, so aim for mail that is 100% wanted by recipients to ensure consistent inbox placement.
Recognize that different campaign types and audience segments will naturally have varying performance metrics, so measure them independently.
Embrace the philosophy of sending less to earn more by focusing on highly engaged subscribers and relevant content.
Your best benchmark is always your own improved past performance.
Expert view
Expert from Email Geeks says that industry averages for opens and clicks should never be the primary target for email marketers because they can be misleading.
2022-07-13 - Email Geeks
Expert view
Expert from Email Geeks says that a mailflow with a 3% click-to-open and less than 1% conversion rate indicates an underlying problem, even if it matches a supposed industry average.
2022-07-13 - Email Geeks
Embrace your internal data for true growth
While industry benchmarks can offer a general landscape view, they are not suitable targets for your email marketing efforts. Your most valuable benchmarks are found within your own data. By focusing on historical performance, segmenting your audience, and aligning your metrics with specific business objectives, you can create a far more effective and sustainable email strategy.
Prioritize deliverability and sender reputation, as these foundational elements dictate whether your messages even reach the inbox. Once your emails are reliably delivered, you can then truly optimize for engagement and conversion. Your goal should always be continuous improvement, striving to send highly relevant and valuable emails that resonate with your specific audience, rather than chasing elusive industry averages.
Google and 
Yahoo use a complex array of signals to decide where your emails land: inbox, spam folder, or nowhere at all.
