Email Statistics by Industry: A UK Business Guide
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Email marketing is one of the few digital channels where the numbers genuinely differ by sector. An 18% open rate could mean your retail campaign is performing well, or that your education newsletter is in serious trouble. Without knowing your industry benchmark, you are optimising without a reference point.
This guide covers email statistics by industry and email benchmarks by industry drawn from Campaign Monitor, Mailchimp, and GetResponse data, supplemented by country-level figures and a dedicated section on B2B email open rates. It also addresses the single most important shift in email measurement since 2021: why your open rate data has been unreliable for longer than most marketing guides admit.
If your current email marketing strategy is producing results that feel disconnected from the effort going in, the data below will tell you whether that is a sector-wide pattern or something specific to fix.
What Each Email Metric Actually Measures
Before comparing yourself to industry averages, it is worth being precise about what each figure tracks and what it does not.
Open rate is the percentage of delivered emails that were recorded as opened. The keyword here is “recorded.” Since Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection (MPP) launched in September 2021, open rate figures have been materially inflated for most senders. More on this below.
Click-through rate (CTR) is the percentage of total recipients who clicked at least one link. This metric is not affected by MPP and therefore provides a more reliable signal of genuine engagement. A healthy CTR with a lower-than-expected open rate often means the open rate is being undercounted, not that your audience is disengaged.
Click-to-open rate (CTOR) measures how well your email content performs among the people who actually read it. It is calculated as unique clicks divided by unique opens. A low CTOR points to a problem with the email body: the offer, the copy, the call to action, or a mismatch between the subject line promise and content delivery.
Unsubscribe rate is the percentage of recipients who opt out after a campaign. Rates consistently above 0.5% indicate a problem with send frequency, audience targeting, or content relevance. Below 0.2% is healthy across most sectors. Above 0.4% warrants immediate attention to list segmentation.
Bounce rate distinguishes between hard bounces (permanent delivery failures from invalid addresses) and soft bounces (temporary failures). Hard bounce rates above 2% signal that your list needs cleaning. Most email service providers will suspend accounts that sustain rates above 5%, because high bounce volumes damage your sender reputation and reduce deliverability across every campaign you send.
Email Statistics by Industry: The Campaign Monitor Benchmarks
The following data comes from Campaign Monitor’s Email Marketing Benchmarks Report, based on analysis of over 100 billion emails. These figures on email open rates by industry represent the most widely used baseline for sector comparisons.
| Industry | Open Rate | CTR | CTOR | Unsubscribe Rate |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Advertising & Marketing | 20.5% | 1.8% | 9.0% | 0.2% |
| Agriculture, Forestry, Fishing & Hunting | 27.3% | 3.4% | 12.5% | 0.3% |
| Consumer Packaged Goods | 20.0% | 1.9% | 11.1% | 0.1% |
| Education | 28.5% | 4.4% | 15.7% | 0.2% |
| Financial Services | 27.1% | 2.4% | 10.1% | 0.2% |
| Restaurant, Food & Beverage | 18.5% | 2.0% | 10.5% | 0.1% |
| Government & Politics | 19.4% | 2.8% | 14.3% | 0.1% |
| Healthcare Services | 23.7% | 3.0% | 13.4% | 0.3% |
| IT / Tech / Software | 22.7% | 2.0% | 9.8% | 0.2% |
| Logistics & Wholesale | 23.4% | 2.0% | 11.7% | 0.3% |
| Media, Entertainment & Publishing | 23.9% | 2.9% | 12.4% | 0.1% |
| Nonprofit | 26.6% | 2.7% | 10.2% | 0.2% |
| Professional Services | 19.3% | 2.1% | 11.1% | 0.2% |
| Real Estate, Design & Construction | 21.7% | 3.6% | 17.2% | 0.2% |
| Retail | 17.1% | 0.7% | 5.8% | 0.1% |
| Travel, Hospitality & Leisure | 20.2% | 1.4% | 8.7% | 0.2% |
| Wellness & Fitness | 19.2% | 1.2% | 6.0% | 0.4% |
| Average | 21.5% | 2.3% | 10.5% | 0.1% |
Source: Campaign Monitor Email Marketing Benchmarks Report. Data from over 100 billion emails across platforms.
A few patterns worth pulling out. Education leads the open rate at 28.5%, with schools and colleges becoming more dependent on email as a primary communication channel from 2020 onwards, and that behaviour has largely held. Real estate, design, and construction have the highest CTOR at 17.2%, indicating that people who open those emails are motivated to act. Retail sits at the bottom of open rate (17.1%) but records the lowest unsubscribe rate (0.1%), meaning audiences stay subscribed even when they don’t open every campaign.
Mailchimp Industry Benchmarks: A Second Dataset
Mailchimp‘s data provides a useful comparison. Their benchmarks track campaigns with a minimum of 1,000 subscribers, drawing predominantly from small businesses and startups rather than enterprise senders. The methodology produces slightly different absolute figures, but the directional patterns are consistent with Campaign Monitor.
| Industry | Avg. Open Rate | Avg. CTR | Hard Bounce | Soft Bounce | Unsubscribe Rate |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Agriculture and Food Services | 23.31% | 2.94% | 0.32% | 0.50% | 0.28% |
| Architecture and Construction | 22.51% | 2.51% | 0.73% | 1.18% | 0.32% |
| Arts and Artists | 26.27% | 2.95% | 0.30% | 0.51% | 0.28% |
| Beauty and Personal Care | 16.65% | 1.92% | 0.26% | 0.33% | 0.30% |
| Business and Finance | 21.56% | 2.72% | 0.43% | 0.55% | 0.20% |
| Computers and Electronics | 19.29% | 2.08% | 0.47% | 0.79% | 0.27% |
| Construction | 21.77% | 2.26% | 0.86% | 1.28% | 0.39% |
| Consulting | 20.13% | 2.49% | 0.50% | 0.79% | 0.27% |
| Creative Services / Agency | 21.39% | 2.66% | 0.58% | 0.93% | 0.35% |
| E-Commerce | 15.68% | 2.01% | 0.19% | 0.26% | 0.27% |
| Education and Training | 23.42% | 2.90% | 0.32% | 0.51% | 0.21% |
| Government | 28.77% | 3.99% | 0.33% | 0.50% | 0.13% |
| Health and Fitness | 21.48% | 2.69% | 0.30% | 0.40% | 0.40% |
| Hobbies | 27.74% | 5.01% | 0.18% | 0.31% | 0.23% |
| Legal | 22.00% | 2.81% | 0.52% | 0.66% | 0.22% |
| Manufacturing | 19.82% | 2.18% | 0.72% | 1.18% | 0.31% |
| Marketing and Advertising | 17.38% | 2.04% | 0.44% | 0.68% | 0.27% |
| Media and Publishing | 22.15% | 4.62% | 0.14% | 0.27% | 0.12% |
| Non-Profit | 25.17% | 2.79% | 0.33% | 0.49% | 0.20% |
| Real Estate | 19.17% | 1.77% | 0.38% | 0.56% | 0.27% |
| Retail | 18.39% | 2.25% | 0.22% | 0.32% | 0.25% |
| Software and Web App | 21.29% | 2.45% | 0.65% | 0.97% | 0.37% |
| Travel and Transportation | 20.44% | 2.25% | 0.31% | 0.51% | 0.24% |
| Average | 21.33% | 2.62% | 0.40% | 0.58% | 0.26% |
Source: Mailchimp Email Marketing Benchmarks. Campaigns with a minimum of 1,000 subscribers.
Government emails top Mailchimp’s table at 28.77%. People genuinely expect to receive communications from official institutions and pay attention when they do. Hobbies-category senders achieve the highest CTR at 5.01%, which reflects the most important structural lesson across all this data: niche lists built around specific interests consistently outperform broad promotional databases on every engagement metric that matters.
The Apple Effect: Why Open Rates Have Been Inflated Since 2021
In September 2021, Apple introduced Mail Privacy Protection in iOS 15. The feature preloads email content in the background when a message is delivered to an Apple Mail inbox, causing the tracking pixel to fire even if the recipient doesn’t read the email.
The practical result: any contact using Apple Mail with MPP enabled registers as an open in your reporting, whether or not they saw a single word. Given that Apple devices account for roughly a third of all email opens globally, this is not a marginal effect. Average open rates across most datasets jumped by 3 to 8 percentage points almost immediately after the feature launched in autumn 2021.
What this means for the benchmarks in this guide: post-2021 industry open rate averages are inflated to some degree across every dataset. The distortion is consistent across each account’s data, so month-on-month trend comparisons remain valid. Cross-industry comparisons, though, should be treated as directional rather than precise.
The metrics that are not affected by MPP are CTR and CTOR. These are now the more reliable indicators of genuine campaign performance. If you are evaluating which content formats, subject line approaches, or send times actually drive engagement, measure by clicks, not opens.
Before and After MPP: What the Numbers Show
| Period | Average Open Rate (Campaign Monitor) | Note |
|---|---|---|
| January–August 2021 | Approx. 19.5–20% | Pre-MPP baseline |
| September 2021 onwards | Approx. 23–30%+ | MPP inflation begins |
| Best practice post-MPP | Track CTOR and CTR | More accurate engagement signal |
Email Marketing Statistics UK and Ireland: The Regional Picture
Most benchmark datasets skew heavily towards US senders. When GetResponse analysed approximately 7 billion emails from 2021, Great Britain recorded an open rate of 18.87%, noticeably below the global average of 22.45%. Understanding why that gap exists matters more than simply accepting it as underperformance.
UK and Irish businesses operate under GDPR and the UK’s Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations (PECR). Both frameworks require demonstrable consent or legitimate interest before you can email someone commercially. This tends to produce smaller, more carefully built lists, which in turn affects average open rates: a larger proportion of UK email lists includes contacts added via passive consent mechanisms or list purchases, diluting engagement. The businesses doing this well (explicit opt-in, clear value proposition at sign-up, regular list hygiene) consistently outperform the UK average.
There is also a timing dimension specific to UK and Irish audiences. B2B engagement peaks on Tuesday and Thursday mornings between 9 am and 11 am GMT. Sunday evening sending, which performs reasonably in US B2B markets, has considerably less traction here.
The GDPR countries in the GetResponse dataset (France, Netherlands, Germany, Belgium) all rank in the top four globally for open rates. Stricter consent requirements, properly applied, produce more engaged recipients. UK businesses that treat data compliance as a list quality investment rather than a legal burden tend to see this reflected in their metrics over time.
Country-Level Email Benchmarks
| Country | Open Rate | CTR | Unsubscribe Rate | Bounce Rate |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| France | 38.33% | 2.56% | 0.25% | 2.74% |
| Netherlands | 32.83% | 4.23% | 0.26% | 2.99% |
| Germany | 29.60% | 5.36% | 0.17% | 1.36% |
| Belgium | 29.02% | 3.74% | 0.31% | 2.51% |
| Canada | 25.96% | 7.02% | 0.12% | 4.27% |
| United States | 23.13% | 3.58% | 0.10% | 3.34% |
| Australia | 19.10% | 1.47% | 0.10% | 1.78% |
| Great Britain | 18.87% | 1.65% | 0.11% | 2.14% |
| Global Average | 22.45% | 2.37% | 0.15% | 2.63% |
Source: GetResponse, analysis of approximately 7 billion emails sent through their platform in 2021.
The UK’s unsubscribe rate of 0.11% is among the lowest in the dataset. This is a meaningful counter-signal to the lower open rate: UK subscribers, once properly opted in, tend to stay on lists. The priority for most UK businesses is not list growth but list activation: getting existing subscribers to open and click consistently.
B2B Email Open Rates: What the Data Shows
B2B email statistics follow a different pattern from B2C. Lists are typically smaller, more tightly targeted, and built around professional intent rather than consumer interest. The result is lower overall volume but materially stronger engagement per recipient.
Average B2B open rates across major platforms range from 19% to 24%, with higher figures in financial services, legal, and professional services. Average B2B CTR runs between 2.4% and 3.0%, comfortably above B2C retail benchmarks. Unsubscribe rates are generally lower in B2B, typically between 0.1% and 0.3%, because recipients have opted in with a specific professional purpose in mind.
B2B vs. B2C: The Core Differences
| Metric | B2B Average | B2C Average | Key Difference |
|---|---|---|---|
| Open Rate | 20–24% | 17–22% | B2B slightly higher; professional intent |
| CTR | 2.4–3.0% | 1.2–2.5% | B2B readers are more action-oriented per open |
| CTOR | 10–15% | 6–12% | B2B readers more action-oriented per open |
| Unsubscribe Rate | 0.1–0.3% | 0.2–0.5% | B2C higher churn from promotional fatigue |
The most consistent finding across B2B email data is that list quality drives performance far more than send frequency. Businesses with the highest CTOR figures are sending to tightly segmented contacts with content that addresses a specific professional problem. A well-segmented B2B list of 400 contacts will consistently outperform a broad database of 4,000 in terms of enquiries generated and revenue influenced.
Industry Deep-Dives
Each sector produces different engagement patterns based on audience expectations, list-building norms, and how often recipients have a functional reason to open what arrives in their inbox. The five sectors below cover the most relevant industries for SMEs across Northern Ireland, Ireland, and the UK, with benchmark figures drawn from the Campaign Monitor and Mailchimp datasets above.
Financial Services Email Statistics
Financial services emails achieve a 27.1% open rate (Campaign Monitor), placing them third across all sectors. The combination of regulatory expectation (recipients understand they will hear from their financial providers) and high perceived relevance drives this. CTR sits at 2.4%, which is appropriate for a sector where conversion actions are typically low-frequency and high-value. For financial services businesses specifically, email compliance in finance is as important a consideration as the campaign metrics themselves, given FCA guidance on financial promotions and the additional constraints on how financial products can be presented in direct communications.
Healthcare Services Email Statistics
Healthcare emails have an open rate of 23.7% and a CTOR of 13.4%. The audience is typically motivated by a specific health concern or an ongoing relationship with a provider, resulting in above-average engagement. Unsubscribe rates are slightly elevated at 0.3%, which often reflects the episodic nature of healthcare needs: contacts who have resolved their concern opt out, while those with ongoing needs stay engaged. This is broadly healthy behaviour and not a cause for concern unless rates rise sharply after a specific campaign type.
Education Email Statistics
Education leads all sectors in open rate (28.5%) and is second in CTOR (15.7%). The audience is not merely subscribed; they are often functionally dependent on the communication. For businesses in training, professional development, or skills provision, this benchmark is a useful reference: audiences with a genuine learning purpose behave similarly to formal education audiences in terms of engagement metrics.
Retail Email Statistics
Retail sits at the bottom of open rate (17.1% Campaign Monitor, 18.39% Mailchimp), but this does not mean email is ineffective for retail. The sector’s challenge is the gap between opening and acting: CTR of just 0.7% in Campaign Monitor’s data points to a content-relevance problem as much as an audience problem. Personalisation and segmentation are the primary levers. Highly targeted promotional emails consistently outperform blanket campaigns in retail, often by a factor of 3 or 4 in CTR.
Professional Services Email Statistics
Professional services emails open at 19.3% but show a CTOR of 11.1%, meaning that recipients who open are genuinely interested in acting. For consultancies, agencies, and specialist service providers, the most effective investment is in list segmentation by service interest rather than in maximising overall open rates. Sending relevant content to a smaller, well-matched segment will produce more enquiries than sending everything to everyone.
Beyond Open Rates: The Metrics That Actually Indicate Performance
Open rate was the default email performance metric for nearly two decades. Since MPP, it has been considered a less precise measure. The following metrics are now more reliable indicators of what your campaigns are actually doing.
CTOR isolates content quality from subject line effectiveness. If your open rate is reasonable but CTOR is low, the problem is the email body: the offer, the copy, the CTA, or a mismatch between what the subject line promised and what the email delivered. For most SMEs, improving CTOR is the highest-value email optimisation available, because it works with your existing audience rather than requiring list growth.
Conversion rate is the percentage of recipients who completed the desired action, and it is not tracked within your email platform unless you have set up UTM parameters and connected your website analytics. Measuring this properly requires integration between your ESP and your analytics tool. Improving digital marketing ROI from email depends almost entirely on closing this measurement gap.
List growth rate (net new subscribers minus unsubscribes and bounces) tells you whether your list is a growing asset or a slowly depleting one. Monthly growth of 1% to 3% combined with a stable or declining unsubscribe rate is a healthier signal than subscriber count growth that masks rising disengagement. Marketing analytics at this level of granularity is where most SMEs identify quick, tangible wins.
Revenue per email sent is the metric most closely connected to commercial outcomes and the least commonly tracked by small businesses. It requires connecting email campaign data to transaction or enquiry data, but once in place, it gives you the clearest possible picture of which campaigns, segments, and content types are generating actual business value.
How to Improve Your Email Marketing Performance
The benchmarks above tell you where you are relative to your sector. These practical steps address the most common performance gaps.
Segment Before You Send
Sending the same email to your entire list is the single most common reason for below-average CTR. A contact who subscribed because of interest in one service area will not engage reliably with content about a different one. Even basic segmentation (active versus inactive, product interest, geography) will lift engagement metrics within two or three campaigns.
Use Triggered Sequences
Triggered emails (welcome sequences, post-enquiry follow-ups, re-engagement campaigns for inactive subscribers) consistently outperform broadcast campaigns on every engagement metric. The relevance is immediate, and the timing is contextual. Email automation tools are available on most mid-tier platforms, making it straightforward to set up these sequences without custom development.
Clean Your List
Remove contacts who have not opened or clicked in the past 6 months. Run a re-engagement campaign first: a short sequence with a clear “do you still want to hear from us?” message. Remove those who don’t respond. A smaller, engaged list outperforms a larger, stale one in terms of deliverability, metrics, and time required to manage. Understanding business email security considerations is relevant here: compromised or abandoned addresses on poorly maintained lists contribute to elevated bounce rates and spam complaints that affect your entire sender reputation.
Optimise for Mobile
Over two-thirds of email opens occur on mobile devices. A single-column layout, minimum 44px CTA buttons, subject lines under 40 characters to avoid truncation on mobile, and preheader text that supplements rather than repeats the subject line are the baseline requirements. If your email doesn’t render cleanly on a phone, a meaningful portion of your most engaged audience will delete it before reading.
Test Subject Lines
A/B testing subject lines on a portion of your list before sending to the full audience is standard practice on most mid-tier ESPs. Variables worth testing in order of typical impact: personalisation (first name in subject), specific versus vague phrasing (numbers typically outperform adjectives), question versus statement, and length (shorter usually wins on mobile).
General Email Statistics Worth Knowing
A few broader figures that provide context for the industry benchmarks above:
- More than 4 billion people use email daily. (Hubspot)
- 81% of B2B marketers rate email newsletters among their most important distribution channels. (Hubspot)
- 90% of content marketers use email engagement as a key metric for measuring content performance. (Hubspot)
- 86% of professionals prioritise email when communicating with current and potential customers. (Hubspot)
- In a Mailjet survey, 41.8% of respondents identified email as the channel most likely to deliver the best ROI during an economic downturn. Digital advertising came second at 41%.
- Four out of five marketers in a HubSpot survey said they would choose email over social media if forced to pick one channel.
These figures reflect what most experienced marketers already know: email has a direct line to your audience that no algorithm-dependent social channel can replicate. The question is not whether to use email but how to use it in a way that the industry benchmarks in this guide make possible to measure.
ProfileTree, the Belfast-based digital agency, regularly reviews email programmes for SMEs across Northern Ireland, Ireland, and the wider UK. According to Ciaran Connolly, founder of ProfileTree: “Most businesses underestimate how much of their email problem is actually a list problem. Once you clean the data and segment properly, the benchmarks become achievable rather than aspirational.”
If your email marketing strategy is producing results significantly below the sector averages in this guide, the starting point is usually a list audit rather than a content overhaul. Get in touch with the team to discuss what your data is telling you.
Making Sense of Your Email Statistics
Industry benchmarks are a starting point, not a verdict. An open rate below the sector average may simply mean your list is larger and less tightly segmented than the businesses pulling that average up. And since Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection arrived in 2021, even a figure above the benchmark is a weaker signal than it used to be.
The metrics worth prioritising are CTR, CTOR, and conversion rate. These connect email activity to business outcomes in a way that open rate no longer reliably does.
For SMEs across Northern Ireland, Ireland, and the UK, the most common improvement available is better list segmentation. Most businesses have a reasonably engaged core audience buried inside a larger, less interested database. Separating those two groups tends to move every metric that matters. ProfileTree’s digital marketing services include email programme reviews for businesses that want a clearer picture of what their data is telling them.
FAQs
What is a good email open rate by industry?
Education and government average above 28%; retail sits below 18%. A benchmark of 20% to 25% is acceptable for most sectors, though open rates have been inflated since Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection launched in 2021, so treat them as directional rather than precise.
What is a good click-through rate for email marketing?
The average sits between 2% and 3%. Above 2.5% on a segmented campaign is a strong result for most SMEs. Consistently below 1% usually points to poor list segmentation or a disconnect between the subject line and the email content.
What are typical unsubscribe rates by industry?
Below 0.5% is healthy; most sectors average 0.2% to 0.3%. Above 0.5% per campaign signals a problem with frequency, content relevance, or targeting. Wellness and fitness emails tend to record the highest rates at around 0.4%.
What are the email marketing benchmarks for UK businesses?
GetResponse data puts the UK open rate at 18.87%, below the global average of 22.45%. GDPR and PECR consent requirements tend to produce smaller but better-quality lists, reflected in the UK’s unsubscribe rate of 0.11%, one of the lowest globally.