Average Email Open Rate in 2026 (and Why It Lies)

Open rate used to be the first number every email marketer checked. Since Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection arrived in 2021, it has become the least reliable metric in your dashboard. It still matters, just not in the way most benchmark articles suggest.

Here are the current, sourced averages, what counts as a good open rate for an ecommerce brand, why the number is inflated, and what to measure instead.

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What is a good email open rate?

For ecommerce brands, an open rate of around 30% is average on 2026 benchmarks, and 40%+ puts you among the top performers. Klaviyo’s 2026 data shows a 31% average for campaigns and 32.2% for flows. Because Apple Mail Privacy Protection inflates every figure, treat open rate as a trend line, not a verdict.

A good open rate is one that is stable or rising on your own account, with click rate and revenue per recipient moving the same way. A 45% open rate with a 0.5% click rate is not a good email. It is an email that Apple opened and people ignored.

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Average email open rate: 2026 benchmarks

Every major platform publishes its own benchmarks, and they disagree. Here is what each source reports, as of September 2026:

Source	Data period	Overall open rate	Ecommerce open rate
Klaviyo (205,000+ brands)	2026 report, published Feb 2026	31% campaigns, 32.2% flows	Ecommerce-only dataset
Mailchimp	Page last updated Dec 2023	35.63%	29.81%
MailerLite (181,000 accounts, medians)	Dec 2024 to Nov 2025	43.46%	32.67%
Campaign Monitor	2021 data	21.5%	Retail lowest at 17.1%

Why the benchmarks disagree

• Audience mix. MailerLite skews toward creators, newsletters and small businesses, whose lists often open more than a promotional ecommerce list does. Klaviyo’s data is almost entirely ecommerce.
• Median versus mean. MailerLite reports medians; others report averages. A few very large, low-engagement senders pull an average down.
• Age of the data. Campaign Monitor’s 21.5% comes from 2021, largely before Mail Privacy Protection inflated opens. It is not comparable with 2026 figures.
• Apple opens. MailerLite states outright that it does not remove Apple’s automatic opens because everyone is affected. Mailchimp and Klaviyo both carry MPP caveats on their benchmark pages.

For an ecommerce brand on Klaviyo, Klaviyo’s own benchmarks are the fairest comparison.

Klaviyo open rate benchmarks by ecommerce industry

From Klaviyo’s 2026 benchmark report:

Industry	Campaign open rate	Flow open rate
Clothing & accessories	33.1%	34.4%
Food & beverage	31.2%	33%
Health & beauty	30.5%	30.5%
Home & garden	32.5%	34.2%
Jewellery	32.5%	32.8%
Sporting goods	31.9%	33.3%
Electronics	29.3%	30.3%
Toys & hobbies	31.7%	31.8%
All industries (average)	31%	32.2%
All industries (top 10%)	45.1%	45.8%

Notice how tightly clustered these are: every industry sits within a few points of 31%. That is partly because Apple’s automatic opens form a large, fairly constant floor under everyone’s numbers. The spread in click rate and placed order rate is far more informative, which is why we cover those in email click-through rate vs click-to-open rate and Klaviyo metrics explained.

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Is a 25% open rate good? What about 35%?

• Under 20%: investigate. On an ecommerce list, this usually points to deliverability (emails landing in spam or promotions) or a list full of long-inactive profiles.
• 20 to 28%: below Klaviyo’s average. Check list hygiene and inbox placement before rewriting subject lines.
• 28 to 35%: around the 2026 average for ecommerce campaigns.
• 35 to 45%: above average. Well-segmented campaigns to engaged subscribers often sit here.
• 45%+: top-10% territory for campaigns, and normal for welcome and post-purchase flows, where the reader has just signed up or bought.

Those bands only mean something alongside click rate. If opens rise and clicks don’t, you have learnt more about Apple than about your subscribers.

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How to calculate email open rate

Open rate = Unique opens ÷ Delivered emails × 100

Example: you send a campaign to 10,000 profiles, 200 bounce, and 3,000 people open it.

• Delivered = 10,000 − 200 = 9,800
• Open rate = 3,000 ÷ 9,800 × 100 = 30.6%

Two details trip people up:

• Unique versus total opens. Unique opens count each person once; total opens count every open. Always compare unique.
• Delivered versus recipients. Klaviyo’s campaign documentation divides unique opens by delivered emails, while its analytics glossary describes it as opens divided by recipients. Most platforms use delivered. Check the denominator before you compare two tools.

How email opens are tracked

An “open” is not someone reading your email. It is a tiny invisible image, the tracking pixel, being downloaded from the sender’s server. When the image loads, the platform logs an open. That design is the root of every open-rate problem:

• If images don’t load (some corporate Outlook setups, users who block images, plain-text views), a real read goes uncounted.
• If something other than the person loads the image, a non-read gets counted. That is exactly what Apple now does.

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Apple Mail Privacy Protection: why open rate became unreliable

Apple introduced Mail Privacy Protection (MPP) with iOS 15 in September 2021. According to Apple’s support documentation, when it is switched on:

• The user’s IP address is hidden from senders.
• Remote content is downloaded privately in the background when a message arrives, instead of when it is viewed.
• Senders can’t see whether the user opened the email.

Because remote content includes the tracking pixel, every email delivered to an MPP user looks “opened”, usually within minutes of arriving, whether or not a human ever looks at it.

The scale is large. Litmus’s email client market share data for July 2026, calculated from over a billion opens, attributes 62.26% of opens to Apple, and Litmus notes that privacy-affected opens are included in that figure. For consumer DTC brands with iPhone-heavy audiences, the share on your own list can be even higher.

What MPP breaks:

• Open rate as a performance metric. Opens are inflated by an amount that depends on your audience’s device mix.
• “Opened in the last X days” engagement segments. They quietly fill up with people who never read anything, which hurts deliverability when you mail them.
• Subject line A/B tests judged on opens. Apple opens both variants equally, which dilutes the difference. Pick winners on clicks or placed orders instead; we explain how in our guide to A/B testing email subject lines.
• Send-time optimisation based on open time. Apple’s opens happen when the email arrives, not when it is read.
• Click-to-open rate. Inflated opens in the denominator push CTOR down.

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Can you trust email open rates?

As a measure of human attention, no. As a relative signal on your own account, partly. Three forces distort the number in different directions:

Distortion	Effect on open rate
Apple Mail Privacy Protection	Inflates (automatic background opens)
Security scanners and link checkers in corporate inboxes	Inflate opens and clicks (mostly a B2B problem)
Images blocked or plain-text view	Deflates (real reads not counted)

Because the mix varies by list, comparing your open rate with another brand’s tells you very little. Comparing this month with last month on the same list, with Apple opens stripped out, tells you something.

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How to check your open rate in Klaviyo, without the Apple noise

Klaviyo reports open rate on every campaign and flow message. To see through MPP:

1. Apple Privacy Open property. Since 20 November 2021, every Klaviyo Opened Email event carries an Apple Privacy Open property set to true or false. Build a custom report on the Opened Email metric, split by that property, to see how much of your open rate is Apple.
2. Engaged segments. Add the filter where Apple Privacy Open equals False to the Opened Email condition in your engaged segments, and lean on clicks, site activity and orders to define engagement.
3. Attribution. In Klaviyo’s attribution settings you can remove Apple Mail Privacy Protection opens from attribution, so an automatic Apple open can’t claim credit for an order. Klaviyo notes this changes attribution only, not reporting. For new accounts, bot clicks are excluded from attribution and reporting by default. Our email revenue attribution guide covers the window settings too.

All of this is described in Klaviyo’s help centre as of September 2026.

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What to measure instead

Open rate answers “did it arrive and get loaded?” The metrics that answer “did it work?” are:

• Click rate (unique clicks ÷ delivered). A human tapped something. Klaviyo’s 2026 campaign average is 1.69%.
• Placed order rate (orders ÷ recipients within the attribution window). Klaviyo’s 2026 campaign average is 0.16%, and flows average 2.11%.
• Revenue per recipient (RPR). The number that ties email to money.

We cover these in Klaviyo metrics explained and benchmark them by flow type in ecommerce email benchmarks.

When open rate still earns its place

• Deliverability early warning. A sudden drop in opens at one mailbox provider, such as Gmail or Outlook, while the others hold steady often means you have slipped into spam there before any other metric shows it. Exclude Apple Privacy opens first so the signal isn’t buried.
• Trend on a fixed list. Same segment, same months, Apple opens excluded: a falling open rate is a real signal.
• Flow health checks. A welcome email with a lower open rate than your campaigns has a problem.

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How to improve your email open rate (the levers that actually work)

Most “improve your open rate” advice is about subject lines. For ecommerce brands, the bigger levers sit upstream:

1. Fix inbox placement. Authentication (SPF, DKIM, DMARC), sender reputation and complaint rate decide whether your email is seen at all. Run the free email deliverability checker and read our deliverability guide.
2. Mail engaged people. Send campaigns to a click-, site- and purchase-based engaged segment, not the whole list. Lower volume, higher placement.
3. Clean the list. Suppress profiles that have not clicked or bought in 180+ days after a sunset attempt. Our list cleaning guide shows how.
4. Use a recognisable sender name. The brand name people bought from, consistently.
5. Write for the preview. Subject line and preview text work as a pair. Test them, judging the winner on clicks.
6. Match frequency to intent. Engaged customers can take more email than cold subscribers. One cadence for everyone produces fatigue at the bottom and missed revenue at the top.

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The bottom line

The average email open rate for ecommerce campaigns sits around 30% on 2026 benchmarks, with the top 10% above 45%. But since Apple Mail Privacy Protection, open rate says more about your audience’s phones than about your emails. Use it to watch deliverability and trends, strip out Apple opens where you can, and judge performance on clicks, orders and revenue per recipient.

If your open rates have fallen and you suspect inbox placement, our email deliverability service starts with a full authentication and reputation audit. Or request a free Klaviyo audit and we’ll tell you whether the problem is deliverability, list quality or content.

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Sources

• Klaviyo, Email marketing benchmarks 2026
• Mailchimp, Email marketing benchmarks
• MailerLite, Email marketing benchmarks
• Campaign Monitor, What are good open rates, CTRs and CTORs?
• Litmus, Email client market share
• Apple, Use Mail Privacy Protection on iPhone
• Klaviyo Help Center, How to identify iOS 15 Mail Privacy Protection opens
• Klaviyo Help Center, How to change your attribution model