Average open rates for email marketing, by industry: how to read the tables
· 1 min read · The Bulk Mail team
Every major email platform publishes a table of average open rates by industry, and every table disagrees with the others. Before you use one to judge your own performance, it is worth knowing what you are looking at.
What an industry benchmark actually is
It is the average open rate of that vendor’s customers who self-selected an industry label when they signed up. Not a survey, not a census — a by-product of one platform’s customer base, weighted by whoever sends the most volume.
That is why the same industry can appear near the top of one vendor’s table and mid-pack in another’s. Both are accurate about their own customers, and neither is a fact about the industry.
Three checks before you cite one
- What year is the data from, and does it straddle the arrival of image pre-loading in major mail clients? Rates before and after are not comparable.
- Unique opens or total opens? The label is often missing, and the difference is large.
- What counts as sent — delivered messages, or everything attempted? Bounces in the denominator quietly lower every rate in the table.
The useful part
Benchmark tables are poor absolute standards and decent relative ones. The consistent finding across vendors is that audiences who asked to hear from you open more than audiences who did not, and that transactional and one-to-one email outperforms broadcast by a wide margin. That ordering is stable even when the numbers are not.
If you take one thing from any benchmark table, take the ranking, not the percentage.
A different measurement for individual email
None of this applies to the proposal you sent this morning. There, the useful measurements are binary and temporal: was it opened, when, how many times, and on what. Bulk Mail reports exactly that, inside Gmail, with the full history kept on Pro.
Track individual sends, not averages.
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