The average marketing email is opened by 43% of recipients and clicked by just 2%, according to MailerLite’s 2026 email marketing benchmarks. Apple’s privacy features now inflate open rates, so click rate is the email marketing benchmark small businesses should trust most. This guide covers the 2026 benchmarks by industry, explains which numbers to ignore and shows how to judge your own results.
MailerLite’s 2026 benchmark report covers more than 3.6 million campaigns from 181,000 accounts. That makes it a useful set of numbers to compare your own emails against.
Across all industries, the averages are a 43.46% open rate, a 2.09% click rate, a 6.81% click-to-open rate and a 0.22% unsubscribe rate. Click rate measures clicks as a share of delivered emails. Click-to-open rate measures clicks as a share of opens.
| Industry | Open rate | Click rate | Click-to-open rate | Unsubscribe rate |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| All industries | 43.46% | 2.09% | 6.81% | 0.22% |
| Consulting | 45.96% | 2.41% | 7.67% | 0.23% |
| Business and finance | 43.34% | 2.37% | 7.96% | 0.16% |
| Agriculture and food services | 45.51% | 1.83% | 6.21% | 0.23% |
| Home and garden | 39.18% | 1.75% | 7.05% | 0.23% |
| Real estate | 40.37% | 1.72% | 6.72% | 0.16% |
| Health and fitness | 47.81% | 1.45% | 4.45% | 0.30% |
| Retail | 37.47% | 1.27% | 4.51% | 0.22% |
| E-commerce | 32.67% | 1.07% | 4.01% | 0.18% |
| Restaurants and cafés | 44.32% | 1.06% | 3.28% | 0.39% |
| Beauty and personal care | 38.40% | 0.95% | 3.91% | 0.23% |
Source: MailerLite email marketing benchmarks.
Apple Mail Privacy Protection preloads emails, so many messages register as opened whether or not anyone reads them. Litmus counted more than 1.5 billion opens in September 2026, and Apple clients accounted for 76.56% of them. Litmus estimates the feature affects roughly 55% to 60% of all email opens.
Picture how that misleads a small business. A bakery owner sees a 58% open rate on the holiday pre-order email and assumes it worked. Yet only 0.6% clicked through to order, well under the 1.06% restaurant average.
Treat open rate as a rough health signal, not a measure of success. MailerLite itself calls click rate the more reliable metric because it does not depend on tracking opens.
Industry matters more than the overall average. A consulting firm and a café can send equally good emails and still see one click rate more than double the other. Compare yourself with the closest industry in the table, not with the headline number.
Professional services lead on clicks: consulting averaged a 2.41% click rate, and business and finance 2.37%. Restaurants and cafés averaged 1.06%, and e-commerce 1.07%. Their emails often aim for a visit or a sale rather than a click to read more.
Automated emails, called flows on some platforms, consistently outperform one-off campaigns. Klaviyo’s 2026 benchmarks, drawn from more than 183,000 customers, put the average flow click rate at 5.58%. The average campaign click rate was 1.69%.
The gap widens further down the funnel. Klaviyo reports that flows earn 13 times the placed order rate of campaigns and nearly 18 times the revenue per recipient. Its data leans toward e-commerce, so service businesses should expect a smaller gap, but the direction holds.
If you send only newsletters, adding a welcome email and an abandoned-quote follow-up will likely lift your click rate more than any subject-line test.
Benchmarks are a starting point, not a target. Average your last 10 campaigns before comparing, because one email to a cold segment can drag a month’s numbers down. Then answer three questions.
If you are within half a percentage point of your industry average, your content is working. If you are well below it, test one clear call to action before changing anything else.
An unsubscribe rate well above 0.22% usually means you are emailing too often or emailing people who did not clearly opt in. Rising bounces point to a list-quality problem, which our email deliverability checklist covers.
A click matters only if it becomes a booking, order or inquiry. Set up GA4 key events to see which emails produce revenue, then add the result to your weekly marketing scorecard.
Across industries, MailerLite's 2026 benchmarks put the average open rate at 43.46%. Because Apple Mail Privacy Protection inflates opens, treat anything near your industry average as normal and judge success by clicks instead.
The average click rate across all industries is 2.09% in MailerLite's 2026 benchmarks. Professional services such as consulting average about 2.4%, while restaurants, retail and e-commerce sit between 1% and 1.3%.
Click rate divides clicks by delivered emails. Click-to-open rate divides clicks by opens, so inflated open counts distort it.
MailerLite's average unsubscribe rate is 0.22% per campaign. A rate well above that usually signals sending too often or emailing people who did not clearly opt in.
Yes. Klaviyo's 2026 benchmarks show an average click rate of 5.58% for automated flows, compared with 1.69% for campaigns.
Picture the same bakery owner next December. They ignore the open rate and check clicks against the 1.06% restaurant benchmark. This time they see 1.8%, because the email had one clear “Pre-order now” button.
Your next step takes 15 minutes. Export your last 10 campaigns, average the click rate and compare it with your industry’s row in the table above.
