Email Open Rates and Click Rates: Benchmarks and Improvement
Understand what open rates and click rates really mean in a post-MPP world, and how to improve them.
Open rates after Apple Mail Privacy Protection
Apple Mail Privacy Protection (MPP), launched in September 2021, pre-fetches email content on Apple's servers — which registers an 'open' even if the subscriber never looks at the email. This has inflated industry open rates by 10–20 percentage points.
What this means for you:
- Open rates are no longer reliable for measuring individual engagement
- Aggregate open rate trends are still useful for comparing campaigns to each other
- For individual subscriber engagement, rely on click activity instead
AskBiz flags Apple Mail opens separately so you can choose whether to include or exclude them from your headline figures.
Open rate benchmarks (post-MPP)
Industry averages vary significantly by sector:
| Sector | Average open rate (post-MPP) |
|--------|------------------------------|
| E-commerce | 40–55% |
| SaaS / tech | 35–50% |
| B2B services | 45–60% |
| Non-profit | 50–65% |
| Media / publishing | 35–45% |
These figures are inflated by MPP. If you exclude Apple Mail opens, expect figures 15–25% lower. Focus on your own trends rather than industry averages.
Click rate and click-to-open rate (CTOR)
Click rate (CTR) = unique clicks ÷ emails delivered
Click-to-open rate (CTOR) = unique clicks ÷ unique opens
CTOR is more useful than raw click rate because it measures how compelling your email content is, once opened. A high open rate but low CTOR means your subject line over-promised.
Benchmarks:
- E-commerce CTR: 2–3%
- E-commerce CTOR: 8–15%
- B2B CTR: 3–5%
- B2B CTOR: 15–25%
CTOR is unaffected by MPP inflation, making it the preferred engagement metric.
Subject line best practices for open rate
Personalisation: including the subscriber's first name or location lifts open rates by 5–10% on average. More effective in B2B than e-commerce.
Length: 30–50 characters performs best on mobile. Avoid truncation — test your subject lines at 400px width.
Urgency and specificity: 'Last chance: 30% off ends midnight' outperforms 'Big sale on now'. But over-using urgency trains subscribers to ignore it.
Emojis: can lift open rates by 3–5% when used sparingly. Avoid in B2B contexts.
A/B testing: always split test subject lines on a subset before full send. AskBiz shows your A/B test results in Campaigns → [Campaign] → Variants.
Improving click rates
Single clear CTA: emails with one call-to-action have 42% higher CTOR than emails with multiple CTAs (Mailchimp data). Lead with your primary CTA.
Button vs text link: styled buttons outperform text links by 20–30% on average. Use a contrasting colour that matches your brand.
Mobile optimisation: over 60% of emails are opened on mobile. Test rendering on iOS Mail, Gmail app, and Samsung Mail. Single-column layouts perform best.
Preview text: preview text is the second line of text visible in the inbox. Use it to complement (not repeat) the subject line and give readers a second reason to open and click.
Segmentation impact on engagement
The single most effective lever for improving both open rates and click rates is better segmentation. Generic broadcast emails to your whole list will always underperform targeted sends.
High-impact segments to try:
- Purchase history: send product recommendations based on past categories
- Browse abandonment: target subscribers who viewed specific products
- Engagement tier: send different content to highly engaged vs lapsed subscribers
- Geography: personalise for local events, currencies, or seasons
AskBiz's Email → Segments page shows engagement rates by segment, helping you identify where targeted campaigns would have the most impact.