A guide to checking email benchmark sources, denominators, privacy effects, and attribution before using a statistic to set a target.
An email benchmark without a date, population, and denominator is not much of a benchmark. A dramatic number may describe a different industry, a selected group of customers, or a metric that sounds like yours but is calculated differently.
Use the dated figures below as context, then compare them with your own audience and measurement definitions. They are vendor samples, not universal targets or promised returns.
| Report | Metric | Reported value | Population and period |
|---|---|---|---|
| MailerLite benchmarks | All-industry click rate | 2.09% | More than 3.6 million campaigns from 181,000 approved accounts, December 2024 to November 2025 |
| MailerLite, same report | Ecommerce click rate | 1.07% | Ecommerce subset of that sample |
| MailerLite, same report | Software and web-app click rate | 1.15% | Software and web-app subset |
| MailerLite, same report | Unsubscribe rate | 0.22% | All-industry sample |
| Klaviyo 2026 benchmarks | Campaign click rate | 1.69% | 2026 report based on more than 183,000 Klaviyo customers |
| Klaviyo, same report | Flow click rate | 5.58% | Automated flows in the same report |
MailerLite's methodology says the benchmarks are medians, although some headings call them averages. Its click rate is the percentage of recipients who clicked a link. Read the methodology before comparing it with your platform's calculation.
Klaviyo's flows and campaigns reach people in different situations. Their observed difference does not prove that converting a campaign into a flow will cause the same improvement. The report-year label is not a claim that the figures cover the whole of calendar 2026.
Sources reviewed September 28, 2026. These are publisher-reported observations, not Brew test results.
If a report does not answer those questions, use it as background rather than a performance target. A vendor's customer sample may be useful, but it is not automatically representative of every sender.
| Metric | A useful definition to record | Common source of confusion |
|---|---|---|
| Delivery rate | Accepted messages divided by attempted sends | Acceptance does not prove inbox placement |
| Click rate | Unique relevant clickers divided by delivered messages | Security scanners can follow links |
| Conversion rate | Defined conversions divided by a stated eligible audience | The attribution window and denominator vary |
| Revenue per recipient | Attributed revenue divided by recipients | Revenue is not margin or incremental profit |
| Unsubscribe rate | Unsubscribes divided by a stated send population | Platforms may use different denominators |
Open rates need particular care because image loading does not reliably prove a person read the email. Read which metrics matter before using opens to rank campaigns or clean a list.
Google's sender guidelines tell senders to keep user-reported spam rates below 0.1% and avoid reaching 0.3%. These are provider requirements and operating limits, not evidence of a healthy campaign's typical performance. Check the current provider documentation and the metric it defines.
A campaign can stay under a provider limit and still be irrelevant to its audience. Aim to understand complaints, not merely stay just below a threshold.
Group comparable messages: newsletters with newsletters, receipts with receipts, and onboarding reminders with onboarding reminders. Record the audience, sending domain, list source, and measurement window.
Use several sends to understand ordinary variation. Investigate abrupt changes before attributing them to copy. A broken link, a new audience source, or a tracking change can move a metric more than the headline did.
For a hypothetical campaign with 2,000 delivered messages and 40 unique human clickers, the click rate is 2%. That arithmetic is an example, not an industry benchmark. The next question is whether those clicks led to the action the campaign promised.
Use the ROI guide for cost and attribution, and the testing guide when you need evidence that a change caused an improvement. Source review: September 28, 2026.
