Short answer: somewhere between 20% and 45%, and the range is that wide because the metric itself broke a few years ago. Here is what the number actually means now.
Why the benchmarks disagree so badly
Look up newsletter open rates and you will find credible sources reporting wildly different figures. Campaign Monitor's older cross-industry data put the average around 21.5%. More recent datasets that include Apple Mail Privacy Protection opens report medians closer to 49%. MailerLite's analysis of millions of campaigns lands in the 42–44% range for 2026.
These are not contradictory. They are measuring different things.
Apple's Mail Privacy Protection, introduced in 2021, pre-loads email images for Apple Mail users whether or not the person opens the message. Every one of those pre-loads registers as an open. Estimates suggest it inflates reported open rates by roughly 15 to 20 percentage points. So a 2020 benchmark and a 2026 benchmark are not comparable, and a platform reporting 44% average opens is largely measuring Apple's servers.
Rough benchmarks, with the caveat attached
| Segment | Reported open rate (post-MPP) |
|---|---|
| Cross-industry average | Roughly 35–43%, depending on dataset |
| B2B and SaaS | Roughly 30–38% |
| Nonprofit and advocacy | 40%+ |
| Ecommerce and retail | Low-to-mid 30s |
| Media and hobby newsletters | Often highest, on strong opt-in intent |
| Pre-MPP era, for context | 20–25% |
Treat all of these as a ceiling rather than the truth. The useful comparison is your own newsletter against itself over time, and against your own vertical, not a cross-industry average that mixes newsletters, promotions, and automated messages into one number.
What a good open rate is actually telling you
Open rate still measures two real things.
Deliverability. If your opens collapse, the likeliest cause is not bad subject lines. It is that you stopped reaching the inbox.
Subject line performance. Relative comparisons between your own sends remain useful, even if the absolute number is inflated.
What it does not measure is whether anyone read your newsletter. That is the part people keep assuming.
The metrics worth more than opens
- Click-to-open rate. Clicks divided by opens. Because it is a ratio, some of the distortion cancels out, and it tells you whether the content delivered on the subject line.
- Click-through rate. Worth knowing that automated, triggered emails dramatically outperform broadcast sends. Klaviyo's 2026 data across 183,000+ brands puts automated flows around 5.6% against roughly 1.7–2.1% for broadcast campaigns.
- Replies. Undervalued and underreported. A reply is a person choosing to talk to you.
- Unsubscribe and complaint rates. Rising complaints mean your list acquisition has outrun your relevance.
- Revenue and meetings. If your newsletter exists to sell something, this is the only metric that settles the argument.
How to actually improve the number
In order of impact: clean your list, because every benchmark source agrees bounces wreck sender reputation. Remove dead weight. Protect your sending reputation, since blasting a large list from your company domain is the fastest way to end up in spam. Segment. And only then write better subject lines, which is real but cannot fix a deliverability problem.
What Bobb measures instead
Bobb writes, grows, and sends your newsletter so it grows your business, which means open rate is a diagnostic here, not a goal.
Every contact gets scored on what they actually do: opens, yes, but weighted alongside clicks, replies, repeat engagement, and site visits after a send. Bobb surfaces the contacts heating up rather than reporting an average across people who will never buy. On the deliverability side, list cleaning runs on every import and sending happens on Bobb's pre-warmed platform domain instead of yours.
You stop watching a percentage and start watching who is ready to talk.