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Email Engagement Benchmarks: 83M Emails, 16 Brands | BS&Co
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What is a good email open rate for e-commerce? “Don't benchmark against absolute open rate numbers — the device mix of your subscriber base matters more than your content quality. Watch for month-over-month trends and use CTOR as your primary engagement metric instead.” What is a good email click rate?
In Benchmarks
1. Make CTOR your primary metric. Open rate is inflated by MPP and unreliable as an absolute benchmark. Click rate is influenced by list size and send strategy. CTOR tells you whether your content is working. If your CTOR is below 6%, you have a content problem that no subject line optimization will solve. Add CTOR to your primary reporting dashboard if it's not there already. “Before you A/B test another subject line, look at what happens after the open: product selection, CTA placement, offer structure, visual hierarchy.” 3. Don't throttle sends based on fear. The portfolio's highest-frequency senders have the best engagement metrics and the lowest unsub rates. If you've been holding back sends because you're worried about fatigue, test increasing frequency by 1-2 emails per month and watch CTOR and unsub rate. If CTOR holds and unsubs don't spike, you have room to send more. The constraint should be "how many emails do I have worth sending?" — not an arbitrary frequency cap.
The pattern: these brands have solved the inbox problem. People see their name and open. What they haven't solved is the content problem — making the email itself worthy of a click. The gap between their open rate performance and their CTOR performance is the opportunity. “The ROI is in redesigning what happens after the open — stronger product features, clearer CTAs, more specific offers, better content hierarchy inside the email.” Content Gap
Tier Open Rate Range Brands High 60 – 70% 5 Mid 50 – 60% 5 Low 27 – 45% 5 “Open rates below 40% signal a potential deliverability or list quality problem worth investigating.” The bottom line on open rates: they're worth monitoring for trends (is yours declining month over month?) but unreliable as an absolute benchmark. Two brands with identical content quality can have wildly different open rates based on their subscriber base's device mix. If 80% of your subscribers use Apple Mail, your open rate is inflated. Watch CTOR instead.
What is click-to-open rate? CTOR measures the percentage of people who clicked after opening. It strips out subject line performance and list quality — it tells you whether the email content itself is working. An 8.2% aggregate CTOR means that of everyone who opened an email across this portfolio, 8.2% clicked through. It's the closest thing email has to a pure content quality metric. “For benchmarking your own brand, compare against the median.” Engagement by Brand Archetype
1. Make CTOR your primary metric. Open rate is inflated by MPP and unreliable as an absolute benchmark. Click rate is influenced by list size and send strategy. CTOR tells you whether your content is working. If your CTOR is below 6%, you have a content problem that no subject line optimization will solve. Add CTOR to your primary reporting dashboard if it's not there already. “Before you A/B test another subject line, look at what happens after the open: product selection, CTA placement, offer structure, visual hierarchy.” 3. Don't throttle sends based on fear. The portfolio's highest-frequency senders have the best engagement metrics and the lowest unsub rates. If you've been holding back sends because you're worried about fatigue, test increasing frequency by 1-2 emails per month and watch CTOR and unsub rate. If CTOR holds and unsubs don't spike, you have room to send more. The constraint should be "how many emails do I have worth sending?" — not an arbitrary frequency cap.