A good open rate for email marketing sits around 40% or higher in 2025, with the all-industry average at roughly 42%. But that number comes with a major caveat: privacy features built into Apple Mail now auto-load tracking pixels for over half of all email opens, inflating reported open rates across the board. Your “real” open rate is almost certainly lower than what your email platform reports.
Understanding where your open rate falls relative to your industry, what’s artificially boosting the number, and which metrics actually matter more will give you a much clearer picture of how your emails are performing.
Average Open Rates by Industry
Open rates vary significantly depending on what you’re sending and who you’re sending to. According to HubSpot’s 2025 benchmarks, here’s where the major categories land:
- All industries: 42.35%
- Nonprofit: 46.49%
- Hospitality and travel: 45.21%
- B2B services: 39.48%
- Retail: 38.58%
- SaaS: 38.14%
Nonprofits and hospitality brands tend to see the highest open rates because their subscribers often have a personal connection to the content. You signed up for updates from a charity you donated to, or you’re tracking deals from a hotel chain you actually use. SaaS and retail emails, on the other hand, compete in crowded inboxes where subscribers may have signed up during a checkout flow without much intent to keep reading.
If you’re hitting the mid-to-high 30s in retail or SaaS, you’re performing about average. If you’re a nonprofit hovering around 40%, you’re actually below your peers. Context matters more than a single “good” number.
Why Reported Open Rates Are Inflated
The open rate you see in your email dashboard is not the number of people who actually read your email. It’s the number of times a tiny invisible image (called a tracking pixel) loaded when someone opened or previewed your message. Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection, introduced in 2021, fundamentally broke this measurement.
Here’s how it works: when an Apple Mail user enables Mail Privacy Protection, Apple’s servers pre-load all tracking pixels in the background, regardless of whether the person actually opens the email. Litmus data shows that over 50% of all email opens now happen on devices with this feature activated. That means more than half of your “opens” could be Apple’s servers reading the email, not a human being.
The practical effect is that open rates across all industries have drifted upward since 2021, making year-over-year comparisons unreliable. An open rate of 42% today is not the same as 42% in 2020. If you’re comparing your current performance to benchmarks from a few years ago, you’re comparing inflated numbers to real ones.
Metrics That Tell You More
Because open rates have become less reliable, click-through rate (CTR) and click-to-open rate (CTOR) are now better indicators of whether your emails are actually working. CTR measures the percentage of all recipients who clicked a link in your email. CTOR measures the percentage of people who opened the email and then clicked, giving you a sense of how compelling your content was to those who did engage.
Neither metric is affected by Apple’s privacy changes, since a click requires a deliberate human action. If your open rate looks healthy but your CTR is flat, your subject lines may be doing their job while the email body isn’t delivering. If both are low, the problem likely starts with who you’re sending to or how often you’re sending.
What Actually Drives Open Rates Up
List Hygiene
The fastest way to improve your open rate is to stop sending to people who aren’t reading. Unengaged subscribers drag down your metrics, hurt your sender reputation with inbox providers, and can push future emails into spam folders. Removing contacts who haven’t opened or clicked in the last 90 to 180 days shrinks your list but concentrates it around people who care. A smaller, more engaged list consistently outperforms a large, stale one in both open rates and conversions.
Keep your bounce rate below 0.5%. Anything above that signals deliverability problems to Gmail, Yahoo, and other providers, which can snowball into lower inbox placement for your entire list.
Authentication and Deliverability
Your open rate can only be as high as your deliverability allows. If your emails land in spam or get blocked entirely, it doesn’t matter how good your subject line is. Google now requires all senders to authenticate with either SPF or DKIM (protocols that verify you’re authorized to send from your domain). Bulk senders, those sending more than 5,000 messages per day to Gmail accounts, must also set up DMARC authentication and support one-click unsubscribe in every marketing email.
Google also expects you to keep your spam complaint rate below 0.10% as reported in Google Postmaster Tools, and to never exceed 0.30%. Crossing that threshold leads to increased spam classification, which means fewer of your emails reach the inbox at all. Yahoo has adopted similar requirements. If you haven’t verified your authentication setup, that’s the single most impactful thing you can do before worrying about subject line optimization.
Subject Lines, Timing, and Segmentation
Once your technical foundation is solid, the levers that move open rates are the ones you’d expect. Subject lines should be specific and relevant to the recipient. Generic lines like “Our monthly newsletter” give no reason to click. Lines that reference something the subscriber recently did, bought, or expressed interest in consistently outperform broad promotional copy.
Segmentation amplifies this effect. Sending a single email to your entire list means some percentage of recipients will find it irrelevant, and irrelevant emails train people to stop opening. Breaking your list into segments based on purchase history, sign-up source, or engagement level lets you tailor both the subject line and the content. Even simple segmentation (active buyers vs. browsers, for example) can push open rates several points higher.
Send timing matters less than most marketers think, but consistency helps. Subscribers who expect your emails on a predictable schedule are more likely to look for them. Testing different days and times can yield marginal improvements, but it rarely makes or breaks performance the way list quality and relevance do.
How to Benchmark Your Own Performance
Rather than chasing a universal “good” number, track your own open rate over time and watch for trends. A steady decline over several months suggests list fatigue or deliverability issues. A sudden drop often points to a technical problem, like a failed authentication record or a domain reputation hit from a spam complaint spike.
Compare your open rate within your own industry using the benchmarks above as a starting point, but weight your click-through rate and conversion rate more heavily when evaluating overall email performance. An email with a 35% open rate and a 4% CTR is outperforming one with a 50% open rate and a 0.5% CTR, because the first one is driving action from real people rather than registering phantom opens from Apple’s servers.