What are good email open rates and click through rates? Plus, learn how to increase yours

Maybe your open rate averages 20%, but your competitors’ are much higher. Or perhaps your click-through rates outperform everyone else! If you don't know how others are doing, you have no way of knowing.

This article is here to help! We’ll share what good open rates, click-through rates and click-to-open rates are, based on our benchmarks data from millions of sent campaigns. We’ll also share industry averages so you can compare yourself to your competitors to see where you stand.

Plus, we've included plenty of tips you can use to improve if your results aren't up to par. Your path to success starts here!

Key takeaways

• A good email open rate is 43.46%, based on our analysis of 3.6 million campaigns sent from 181,000+ accounts between December 2024 and November 2025

• A good email click-through rate is 2.09%, though this varies widely by industry, from as low as 0.83% in politics to 4.90% in legal

• A good email click-to-open rate is 6.81%, meaning that on average, just under 7 in every 100 people who open an email go on to click a link inside it

• Increase opens by writing subject lines between 20 and 40 characters, adding a custom preheader, segmenting your list, and sending at the right time

• Increase clicks by including 2 to 5 links, aligning your subject line with your main CTA, and sending targeted content to the right segments

Email open rate measures the percentage of recipients who open your email campaign. When someone opens your email, it suggests that the subject line caught their attention and the email topic interests them. The higher the email open rate, the better.

You can calculate your email open rate by dividing the total unique opens by the total recipients and then multiplying the answer by 100 to get a percentage. A unique open is the number of individual subscribers who opened your email. Even if the person opens your email several times, it counts as a single open.

You should also first deduct hard and soft email bounces from the total recipients. These emails failed to deliver, so it makes sense to leave them out of the equation.

While it’s good to know how to calculate your email open rate, most email service providers (ESPs) automatically work out the open rate for each email campaign. In MailerLite, open rates are shown in your dashboard and reports. Easy-peasy!

Based on our analysis of over 3.6 million campaigns sent from 181,000+ approved accounts between December 2024 and November 2025, a good open rate is as 43.46%, a slight increase from 42.35% in 2024.

Open rates by industry ranged from 30.1% to 55.71%, so what counts as "good" depends significantly on your sector. If your open rate sits around or above your industry benchmark, you're doing well.

The email marketing benchmarks report also shows the open rates for different industries. The industry with the highest open rate was religion at 55.71%, followed by hobbies (53.25%) and non-profit (52.38%)

The industry with the lowest open rate was travel and transportation at 30.10%, followed by e-commerce (32.67%) and publishing (34.24%). Check out the full data for your industry below.

Email click-through rate (CTR) shows how many people clicked somewhere after opening the email. This percentage is a good indicator of how relevant or interesting your email content is. It also gives you good insights into how well your call-to-action placements worked.

To know the percentage of people who clicked at least one link in your email, we need to divide the total number of email recipients who clicked by the total emails delivered. The delivery number excludes emails that bounced.

A good email click-through rate is 2.09%, this was the median figure in our analysis of 3.6 million campaigns. Click rates across industries ranged from 0.83% to 4.90%.

Because click rate doesn't rely on open tracking, it's currently the most accurate indicator of genuine campaign engagement. If your numbers fall below your industry benchmark, the tips later in this article can help.

The highest click rate by industry was legal at 4.90%, followed by manufacturing (4.22%) and media (4.10%). The lowest click rate was politics at 0.83%, followed by beauty and personal care (0.95%) and restaurants and cafes (1.06%). See the click rate for your industry in the table below.

Click-to-open rate (CTOR) measures the percentage of people who opened your email and then clicked a link inside it. It strips out the effect of your subject line and focuses purely on whether your email content was engaging enough to drive action.

A low open rate with a high CTOR suggests that while fewer people open your emails, those who do find the content compelling. In that situation, improving your subject line is likely to have a big impact on overall performance.

To calculate CTOR, divide the total number of unique clicks by the total number of unique opens, then multiply by 100.

CTOR = (total unique clicks / total unique opens) x 100

For example, if 1,000 people opened your email and 68 of them clicked a link, your CTOR would be 6.8%.

Since CTOR only counts people who actually saw your email content, it’s a good measure of whether your email body, design, and call to action are doing their job, independent of how compelling your subject line was.

A good CTOR is 6.81%, this was the median across our dataset. CTOR by industry ranged from 2.96% to 14.82%.

Here are the average click-to-open rates by industry. The highest CTOR by industry was manufacturing at 14.82%, followed by legal (14.72%) and media (12.92%). The lowest CTORs were politics (2.96%), insurance (3.19%), and restaurants and cafes (3.28%).

Whether your metrics fall below industry benchmarks or you simply want to push them higher, here are tactics that make a real difference.

1. Write better subject lines

Your subject line is the first thing people see when deciding whether to open your email. Writing better ones can increase your open rates significantly. 

What makes a good subject? When we studied what factors correlate with high open rates, we found that:

• Top campaigns were 45% more likely to have a subject line between 20 and 40 characters. Mobile inboxes typically show around 30 characters, so keeping your subject line in this range ensures most of it is visible.

• Top campaigns were 21% more likely to include an emoji. Emojis help your email stand out against a wall of plain text. That said, test this for your own audience, adding an emoji may not fit every brand tone.

Also consider using our AI subject line generator that auto-suggests subject lines based on your email content. Our data shows that users who applied AI suggestions saw open rates increase from 26.7% to 30.4% on campaigns sent to 10,000+ subscribers, a 13.7% uplift.

2. Use a custom preheader

The preheader is the text that appears next to your subject line in the inbox. It's one of the most overlooked opportunities in email marketing. 

Our data showed that top-performing campaigns were 23% more likely to include a custom preheader than bottom performers. Take a few minutes to write one for every campaign, or use our AI suggestions. 

3. Segment your list

Sending targeted emails is one of the best things you can do to increase open rates. Top campaigns in our study were 28% more likely to use subscriber filters like groups or segments than low-performing campaigns. 

The reason why is simple. When recipients get emails that feel relevant to them, they're more likely to open and click.

Our e-commerce data reinforces this: targeted campaigns had open rates 36.69% higher and click rates 267.21% higher than untargeted ones.

4. Send at the right time

Our send time study found that emails sent between 9 and 11 AM local time get the most opens. The only outlier was Friday, when the best time to send was 6 PM. 

You can also use MailerLite's Smart Sending feature to optimize opens. This analyzes past subscribers, such as when they typically open your emails, to automatically send your message to each person when they're most likely to open.

5. Optimize how many links you include

Our analysis of 317,000 campaigns found that emails with 2 to 5 links had the highest click rate, 8.9% above average, as well as the highest open rate and conversion rate.

The likely reason is that 2 to 5 links gives subscribers enough variety to find something that interests them, meaning they’re more likely to click. 

Emails with over 20 links actually had the highest click-to-open rate, suggesting that more links can lead to more clicks. But, these messages had by far the lowest open rate of any group—9.86% below average. 

Since fewer people were opening the emails, they had fewer clicks overall. 

6. Manage email list subscribers regularly

Even in email marketing, regular check-ups are necessary. Schedule some time to see which recipients are active, and which have not shown much engagement lately. Reengaging or removing subscribers who don’t open your emails will give your open rate a boost.

For inactive recipients, you could create a win-back message to reignite their interest in your content. 

If they don’t engage after receiving the win-back message, remove them from your list. This might sound like a loss, but you’ll win by achieving higher open rates. 

7. Send unread emails again

How many emails are unopened in your mailbox right now? If you’re anything like the average human, the answer is a lot. Sometimes messages are overlooked. This doesn’t necessarily mean that someone’s not interested. It could be that the email got lost in the sea of messages.

Auto-resend campaigns help by automatically sending a follow-up message to people who didn’t open or click on your first message. This doesn't increase the open rate of your campaign, but it's still an easy way to get far more eyes on your content.

8. Keep readers engaged inside the email

Grabbing someone’s attention is one thing, keeping it another. People disengage when you don’t put effort into the conversation, and it’s the same with email marketing.

So, how can we keep emails engaging? A great option is to embed interactive content. We’re talking email surveys, polls, quizzes, and RSVPs. It’s fun for readers and helps you to get to know your target audience better.

9. Discover people’s preferences with A/B tests

How well do you know your email subscribers? You might have a hunch of what attracts the people on your email list to your content, but the only way to know for sure is by asking them. And the easiest way to “ask” is through A/B testing.

For your next campaign, send two (or more) versions of an email and watch people’s behavior. You might find that emojis perform better. Or short email copy. Or bigger buttons. People will tell you what they prefer best, and if you listen and tweak accordingly, your email CTR will significantly improve!

Time to experiment with your email campaigns

We gave you a lot, didn’t we? As email marketers, we’ll forever be tweaking and testing, but that’s what makes it so fun!

Let yourself be surprised by the results of an A/B test, spend an afternoon brainstorming catchy subject lines, or implement a poll to learn new things about your recipients.

Hopefully, your email open and click-through rates were on par with the industry averages, or even better! And if they weren’t, they will be after you implement some (or all) of the steps mentioned. 

Remember: The more you know your audience, the better your click-through rates and email open rates will be. So whatever strategy gives you deeper insights into your audience, start there!

Editor's note: This article was originally published in 2024 and has been updated with new data.