The email open rate is the first number every small business owner looks at after a send, and it is the least trustworthy number on the report. That is not a criticism of your email platform. It is a consequence of a privacy change Apple shipped years ago that quietly broke the measurement, and most benchmark articles still quote figures as though nothing happened.
This piece covers what counts as normal, how the number is actually calculated, exactly what broke, and which metrics to promote in its place. The short version: keep watching it, stop deciding anything important with it.
What Counts as a Good Email Open Rate
Mailchimp’s published benchmarks put the average across all industries at 35.63 percent opens and 2.62 percent clicks. Non-profits sit at the top of the table at 40.04 percent, and ecommerce sits at the bottom at 29.81 percent.
Two caveats belong right next to those figures, because they change how you should use them. First, Mailchimp states the data on that page was last updated in December 2023. Second, and more important, Mailchimp adds its own warning that open accuracy “may be impacted by Apple’s privacy changes and their Mail Privacy Protection (MPP) feature, and this should be considered as you interpret open rate data.”
So the honest answer to what a good email open rate looks like is: somewhere in the thirties is unremarkable, a sharp change in your own trend line means more than any industry average, and the number itself is partly fictional. Compare yourself to your own last twelve sends, not to a table built from a different list, a different audience and a different year.
How the Email Open Rate Is Calculated
Unique opens divided by delivered emails, multiplied by 100. Delivered is sent minus bounces, so the denominator is always smaller than your list size, which is one reason a small list with heavy bouncing can show a flattering percentage.
The mechanism underneath is a single transparent image, one pixel across, embedded in the email. When a mail client loads that image from the sender’s server, the send is recorded as opened. That is the entire technology. It means an open has never really meant “read.” It has always meant “images loaded,” and the gap between those two things is where the whole problem lives.
Why the Number Stopped Meaning What It Used To
Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection changed when that pixel loads. Apple’s own documentation is unambiguous: with Protect Mail Activity turned on, “remote content is privately downloaded in the background when you receive a message” instead of when you view it, and the feature “prevents senders from seeing if you’ve opened the email message they sent you.”
Read that carefully. The pixel fires on delivery, not on reading. Every message delivered to an Apple Mail user with the setting on is counted as an open whether or not a human ever looked at it. Apple also routes that content through two relays so the sender never sees the real IP address, which takes location and device data off the table at the same time.
The practical consequence for a small business is that a meaningful slice of your reported opens are machines. Your email open rate did not improve when this rolled out; your measurement inflated. And because the share of your list on Apple Mail is different from the share on anyone else’s list, two businesses with identical engagement can post very different numbers.
What to Track Instead
Every metric below survives the pixel problem, because each one requires a deliberate human action.
- Click rate. Somebody chose a link. Nothing loads a link in the background. This is the closest thing to a reliable engagement signal you have.
- Click-to-open rate, with a caveat. Clicks divided by opens is a useful read on whether the content delivered on the subject line’s promise, but it inherits the inflated denominator, so watch its direction rather than its absolute value.
- Conversions. Replies, bookings, form submissions, purchases. The only number that answers whether the campaign did its job.
- Unsubscribes and spam complaints. A rising complaint rate is the single most urgent signal on the report, because it damages the deliverability every future send depends on.
- List growth against list decay. If new subscribers are not outpacing the addresses going quiet, engagement will fall no matter how good the writing is.
If you use opens to trigger automations, this is worth auditing today. A re-engagement sequence that fires because someone “did not open” will now skip a large group of genuinely disengaged Apple Mail contacts, because those contacts look busy to the system. Rebuild those triggers on clicks or on site activity instead.
How to Improve Your Email Open Rate Anyway
The number is noisy, but the things that move it are still the things that make email work, so the effort is not wasted.
Fix deliverability first. Nothing else matters if you are landing in spam, and the causes are usually technical rather than editorial. That is a separate diagnosis, and our guide to why emails go to spam walks through it.
Make the sender name a person or a business people recognize. Recipients scan the from line before the subject. An unfamiliar name is deleted unread regardless of what the subject says.
Write the subject line for the inbox it lands in, which is a craft of its own and the lever with the most direct effect on whether a message gets opened at all. We covered the patterns that hold up in email subject lines that get opened.
Send to fewer people, more relevantly. Sending everything to everyone trains an audience to ignore you. Segmenting your list lifts real engagement rather than the reported figure.
Clean the list on a schedule. Suppress addresses with no clicks across a long stretch, after one honest attempt to win them back. It feels like going backwards and it protects the sender reputation that everything else depends on.
Email Open Rate: Frequently Asked Questions
What is a good email open rate?
Mailchimp’s published benchmarks put the all-industry average at 35.63 percent, though that table was last updated in December 2023 and Mailchimp itself warns the figure is affected by Apple’s privacy changes. Treat anything in that range as normal, and compare against your own past sends rather than an industry table.
How do you calculate email open rate?
Divide the number of unique opens by the number of emails delivered, then multiply by 100. Delivered means sent minus bounces, so the denominator is smaller than your list. Most platforms count unique opens rather than total opens, which is why forwarded and reopened messages do not inflate it further.
Why are my email open rates declining?
Usually one of four things: your list has aged and old addresses no longer engage, your emails are landing in promotions or spam, your sending name or subject line stopped being recognizable, or your platform changed how it filters machine opens. Check deliverability before you rewrite subject lines.
Are email open rates still accurate?
No, and Apple says so directly. Mail Privacy Protection downloads remote content in the background when a message arrives rather than when it is read, which trips the tracking pixel without a human involved. Apple states it prevents senders from seeing whether a message was opened at all.
What is a good email open rate by industry?
In Mailchimp’s benchmark table non-profits sit highest at 40.04 percent and ecommerce lowest at 29.81 percent, a spread of roughly ten points across sectors. The pattern is consistent: mission-driven and relationship-based senders get opened more than retail promotions do.
Watch the Trend, Decide on the Clicks
Keep the email open rate on the dashboard. It is still a useful smoke alarm, because a number that falls off a cliff usually means a deliverability problem worth investigating the same day. Just stop letting it decide anything on its own.
Judge campaigns on clicks and on what happened afterwards, rebuild any automation that branches on opens, and compare every send to your own history rather than a benchmark table. For how this fits into the rest of the channel, from list building through automation, start with our guide to email marketing for small business, or with building the list if you are still early.
Get More From the List You Already Have
Most small business lists underperform for reasons that have nothing to do with writing, which is where our email marketing work usually starts. If your sends have gone quiet and the reports are not telling you why, get in touch with Demur Design and we will look at the numbers with you. For more plain guidance on metrics that keep changing underneath us, subscribe to the Demur Design newsletter in the footer below.
This article is researched and drafted with AI, then reviewed, fact-checked, and published by Demur Design.
