A 20 % open rate is a normal result in 2026, not a reason to panic. The averages published by email marketing tools range from roughly 20 % to 43 %, and the difference between them is not made by the quality of the emails but by the way opens are measured. Apple Mail opens emails automatically, Gmail stores images in its own cache and corporate security gateways check links before a human ever sees the email. In this article I explain what the individual numbers in Quanda's statistics mean, which values are common today and what to look at instead of opens.
In a nutshell
- A 20 % open rate is a common value. Tool averages fluctuate between 20 and 43 % depending on whether they count automatic opens.
- Apple Mail accounts for 62 % of opens and performs a large share of them automatically without the recipient.
- More reliable metrics are the click rate (commonly 2 to 3 %), click-to-open rate, replies and orders.
- An unsubscribe rate around 0.2 % is fine. The spam complaint rate must stay below 0.3 %.
- Quanda automatically blacklists undeliverable addresses to protect your domain's reputation.
- Compare your own campaigns with each other above all. Somebody else's average says less than your own trend.
In brief: what is normal, why the numbers differ, what to track and what is at stake
- What is normal: a 20 % open rate is a common result. Tool averages range from 20 to 43 %.
- Why the numbers differ: Apple Mail opens emails automatically and accounts for 62 % of opens. Tools either count automatic opens or filter them out.
- What to track: click rate (2 to 3 %), click-to-open rate, replies, forms and orders. Calculate percentages from delivered emails, not sent ones.
- What is at stake: a spam complaint rate above 0.3 % means Gmail and Yahoo start rejecting your emails. Quanda blacklists undeliverable addresses to protect your domain's reputation.
What has changed since this article was published: The article was published in February 2016 with a Mailchimp table in which the open rate for most industries was around 20 %. Since 2021, Apple Mail Privacy Protection has been opening emails automatically, reported averages have risen to 35 to 43 % and the open rate has stopped being a reliable metric. Since 2024, Gmail and Yahoo decide on delivery based on the spam complaint rate, which must stay below 0.3 %. The tables in the article have been replaced with benchmarks from 2025 and 2026 and supplemented with Quanda's figures for January to August 2026.
Why the numbers from different sources differ so much
Search for “average email open rate” and you will find values from 20 to 45 %. All of them are correct, they just measure different things.
An email open is measured with a tiny image that loads from the server the moment the recipient displays the email. Since 2021, however, Apple Mail's Mail Privacy Protection downloads all images in advance to Apple's own servers, regardless of whether the recipient opened the email at all. According to Litmus, Apple accounted for 62 % of all opens in July 2026 and Gmail for 27 %. Part of the reported opens were therefore performed by a machine, not a person. On top of that, corporate mail servers often check links and images in an email before delivering it, which also counts as an open.
Tools that do not filter automatic opens report averages around 35 to 43 %. Tools that filter them out report around 20 %. Your number depends on how many iPhone users and corporate mailboxes you have in your database, and on how opens are counted.
What the values in email campaign statistics mean
First, let's look at what the individual numbers we track in Quanda's campaign statistics mean. A detailed definition of every term is in the help article What the terms in statistics mean.
Sent
The total number of unique recipients the email was sent to, including addresses that turned out to be undeliverable.
Delivered
The number of recipients whose mail server actually accepted the email. Calculate all percentages in the statistics from this number, not from sent.
Undelivered
The difference between sent and delivered. These are addresses where the server refused to accept the email, and they are handled according to the rules for blacklisted contacts described below. You will find the list, including the reason, at the bottom of the statistics page.
Opened in total
The total number of opens of your email messages. If somebody opened the message repeatedly, they are counted several times in this number. So if you send, for example, 100 emails and some people open them more than once, this number can be higher than the total number of delivered messages.
Opened uniquely
How many individual recipients opened the email, regardless of how many times each of them opened it. The open rate is calculated from this number. If every recipient who received your email opened it, it would equal the number of delivered emails.
Clicks in total and Unique clicks
The total number of clicks on links in the email and the number of recipients who clicked at least once on any link. The click rate (CTR) is calculated from unique clicks. Further down in the statistics you can see a detailed view of recipients grouped by the link they clicked. If somebody clicks every link in your email, they appear on each of the lists next to the individual links.
Social media
The number of recipients who clicked a social network or website icon in the email footer, separately for each icon.
Marked as SPAM
The number of recipients who marked your email as junk. Since 2024 this number matters more than the open rate, because Gmail and Yahoo use it to decide whether to deliver your emails at all.
Unsubscribed
The number and list of recipients who unsubscribed from your email campaigns using the link in the footer.
On the statistics page you also see the percentages of the individual values and the campaign's performance by group, i.e. by tag.
Blacklisted addresses: why Quanda removes some contacts
Your contacts have a “Blacklisted” column with the value “Yes” or “No”. “Yes” means that a delivery problem occurred at that address and it is currently not possible to deliver an email to it.
This status is either permanent (for example when we find out that the address does not exist) or temporary. A temporarily blacklisted address, say because of a full mailbox, is returned to the recipients after a certain period and we try to deliver the next message. If that fails again, the address goes back on the blacklist for a longer period, in days, weeks or months. You can see the reason for each contact in the Hard Bounce Reason and Soft Bounce Reason columns, as described in the help article Blacklisted contacts.
This mechanism exists in Quanda mainly for your protection. Anyone who repeatedly sends emails to addresses that do not exist or do not work looks to mail servers like a robot sending blindly. The servers start penalising the sender, put the domain on a blacklist, and all of its emails then end up undelivered or in the recipients' spam folders.
The method we chose effectively prevents this, so you send your emails only to addresses that work.
Jan SpáčilCEO QuandaWhich numbers are normal in 2026
The original 2016 version of this article contained a Mailchimp table with open rates around 20 % for most industries. Those numbers no longer apply, not because people read more emails, but because of the automatic opens described above. The table summarises current values from publicly available surveys.
| Metric | Value | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Open rate, all industries, including automatic opens | 35.6 % | Mailchimp |
| Open rate, all industries, December 2024 to November 2025 | 43.5 % | MailerLite |
| Open rate with and without Apple Mail's automatic opens | 33.9 % and 20.7 % | Brevo |
| Open rate in Quanda, all customers, January to August 2026, total and unique | 43.4 % and 28.2 % | Quanda |
| Open rate and click rate in Europe | 45.1 % and 2.0 % | MailerLite |
| Click rate (CTR), all industries | 2.1 to 2.6 % | MailerLite, Mailchimp |
| Click-to-open rate (CTOR) | 6.8 % | MailerLite |
| Unsubscribe rate | 0.22 % | Mailchimp, MailerLite |
| Apple's share of opens (Gmail 27 %) | 62 % | Litmus, July 2026 |
| Acceptable spam complaint rate at Gmail | below 0.3 %, ideally below 0.1 % | Google, bulk sender requirements |
Open rates still differ between industries. Non-profits, churches, government and education traditionally have the highest, i.e. senders whose emails recipients actually want. E-commerce and software have the lowest, because their recipients' inboxes are the fullest.
| Industry | Open rate | Click rate | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| Non-profits | 40.0 % | 3.3 % | Mailchimp |
| Education and training | 35.6 % | 3.0 % | Mailchimp |
| Business and finance | 31.4 % | 2.8 % | Mailchimp |
| E-commerce | 29.8 % | 1.7 % | Mailchimp |
| Legal services | 42.6 % | 4.9 % | MailerLite |
| Non-profits | 52.4 % | 2.9 % | MailerLite |
| Health and fitness | 47.8 % | 1.5 % | MailerLite |
| E-commerce | 32.7 % | 1.1 % | MailerLite |
A note on the numbers: The surveys come from tools whose customers send mostly B2C newsletters in the USA and Western Europe. They also do not account for how many emails ended up in the spam folder, because such an email enters the statistics as delivered. Treat them as an indicative range, not as a bar to clear. If your open rate is 20 % and your click rate 2.5 %, you are in the range where most honestly built databases sit.
How to evaluate your own campaign
Somebody else's average tells you whether you are outside the range. What to do better is something only a comparison of your own campaigns will tell you.
Watch the trend, not a single campaign. The open rate of one campaign is affected by the day of sending, the subject line and how many recipients happened to be on holiday. Compare your last five to ten campaigns. A falling trend is a signal, variation between individual campaigns is not.
Calculate percentages from delivered. If your database contains many undeliverable addresses, the open rate calculated from sent looks worse than it really is. At the same time it is a signal that the database needs cleaning.
Look at the click-to-open rate. The ratio of unique clicks to unique opens tells you whether the content of the email delivered what the subject line promised. If many people open it and few click, the problem is in the content, or the email lacks a clear call to action.
Keep an eye on unsubscribes and complaints. An unsubscribe rate around 0.2 % is healthy. An unsubscribe is better than a spam complaint, so do not hide the unsubscribe link. The complaint rate must stay below 0.3 %, otherwise Gmail and Yahoo start rejecting your emails, as described in the article Gmail, Yahoo and Outlook requirements for bulk email senders.
Measure what has value for the business. Replies to the email, completed forms, bookings, orders. An open is only the first step, and one we can no longer count reliably. Why this applies doubly in B2B is explained in the article Email marketing in B2B: why it still works in 2026.
Tip: Eight questions every recipient asks about your email, and how to answer them, are summarised in the article 8 practical tips on how to improve your email marketing. Most of them decide whether the email gets opened at all.
What to do when the open rate is low
- Verify your sending domain with DKIM, SPF and DMARC records following the guide DKIM, SPF, DMARC, link branding and sending domain verification. Without them, emails end up in spam whatever the content.
- Use a real person's name as the sender, not an anonymous info@ address. The name is the first thing the recipient decides by.
- Write a subject line that says what is inside and why it matters to the recipient right now. The subject line has the decisive influence on opens.
- Remove addresses that have not opened or clicked anything in the last 12 months from the database. Alternatively, address them separately with a reactivation campaign.
- Divide the database with tags by interest and send each group what interests it. A relevant email is opened by more people than a mass one.
- Try an A/B test of the subject line on part of the database and send the rest with the winning variant.
Conclusion
A 20 % open rate is neither a lot nor a little. It is a number that says nothing without context, and in 2026 it is also a number largely generated by machines. Keep your database clean, send from a verified domain and measure clicks, replies and orders. Those show whether your email marketing works.
If you are not sure how to read your statistics, get in touch. We will go through your campaigns with you and tell you where you have room to improve.
I'll keep my fingers crossed for you and wish you great results with your email marketing.
