Email marketing metrics: What good looks like in 2026

The five email marketing metrics worth tracking are open rate, click-through rate, click-to-open rate, unsubscribe rate, and bounce rate, and each only means something against a baseline. Many of the baselines in circulation are several years old or drawn from audiences nothing like yours. Acoustic's 2026 marketing benchmark report analyzed 2025 sends from brands using Acoustic across 16 industries and 8 regions, split into scheduled, automated, and transactional mail. This page takes the five metrics that report tracks and answers the question behind each one: what does a good number look like, and when should it worry you?

Tying those sends to revenue is the job of email marketing analytics. The metrics here are the send-level signals underneath it.

Key takeaways

From Acoustic's 2026 marketing benchmark report (2025 sends, 16 industries, 8 regions):

• The report's 2025 open rate was 37.5%, but it calls the post-2021 jump "largely artificial." Read open rate as a trend, not a score.
• Click-through and click-to-open rates are the stronger engagement signals. Automated emails have beaten scheduled campaigns on click-through rate every year since 2021, by 2x to 4x.
• A healthy unsubscribe rate for scheduled campaigns sits at or below 0.10%.
• Bounce rates stay well under 1% to 2% on well-managed lists, and a hard bounce rate consistently above 2% is a deliverability red flag.

Which email marketing metrics should you track?

The email marketing metrics worth tracking are the five that Acoustic's benchmark report measures: open rate, click-through rate, click-to-open rate, unsubscribe rate, and bounce rate. Each is simple to calculate from your own export, and each answers a different question, so no single one works as an overall score for a program.

Send type changes every one of those numbers, which is why the report breaks each metric out by send type. North America, which the report describes as performing at benchmark on opens, clicks, and unsubscribes, shows the pattern clearly:

Compare your scheduled campaigns to the scheduled column and your triggered flows to the automated one. A program that looks weak against a blended figure may be fine once the send types are separated.

What is a good email open rate?

A good email open rate in 2025 sat near the 2026 benchmark report's headline figure of 37.5%, but open rate is the least reliable number on this page. Opens more than doubled from 18.5% in 2021, and the report calls that increase "largely artificial": Apple's Mail Privacy Protection downloads email content in the background whether or not anyone reads it.

Use open rate to track your own trend over time. It still earns its place in one job: a consistently low open rate at one mailbox provider is a strong sign your mail isn't reaching that provider's inbox. The report also expects open rate to get less reliable as AI-generated inbox summaries satisfy readers without an open ever registering.

What is a good click-through rate for email?

A good click-through rate for email depends mostly on send type. The 2026 benchmark report's 2025 click-through rate was 1.2%, but automated emails reached 2.4% against 1.1% for scheduled campaigns, and automated has outperformed scheduled every year since 2021. Measure scheduled and triggered mail separately or the blended figure will mislead you.

CTR has drifted down from 1.4% in 2021, a decline the report treats as a real shift in engagement rather than a privacy artifact, since clicks aren't affected by Mail Privacy Protection. The one thing that can distort CTR is security software clicking every link in a message to scan it, which can make a campaign look far more engaging than it was. If a send posts an implausibly high CTR, check for that before celebrating.

What is a good click-to-open rate?

A good click-to-open rate starts from the 2026 benchmark report's 2025 figure of 3.3%, and the report calls CTOR "now the most important content quality metric" because it "partially controls for MPP inflation." It measures what happens after someone opens, so it tells you whether the content lived up to the subject line.

CTOR fell from 7.7% in 2021, more than half, and most of that drop is arithmetic: Mail Privacy Protection inflated the opens in the denominator while genuine clicking stayed roughly stable. That makes direction more useful than the absolute number. The report's test: if your CTOR is declining while open rate is rising, your content is getting less relevant, even as more opens are recorded.

What is a healthy email unsubscribe rate?

A healthy email unsubscribe rate for scheduled campaigns is at or below 0.10%. A scheduled rate consistently above 0.15% warrants a review of send frequency, content relevance, and your preference center. On automated flows, anything above 0.25% can point to problems in the sequence itself.

The report's 2025 unsubscribe rate was 0.072%, up from 0.059% in 2021. It reads that rise partly as a good sign: one-click unsubscribe makes leaving easier, and a rising rate can mean subscribers are managing their preferences. It's also the cheaper outcome, because an easy unsubscribe protects sender reputation in a way a spam complaint never does.

What is a good email bounce rate?

A good email bounce rate stays well under 1% to 2% when your list is well managed, according to Acoustic's 2026 benchmark report, and nearly all of it should be soft bounces: full mailboxes, server issues, rate limiting. Hard bounces are near zero across the entire dataset, so a meaningful hard bounce rate stands out immediately.

The thresholds in the report are specific. Target a hard bounce rate below 1.0% for scheduled campaigns; a hard bounce rate consistently above 2% is a deliverability red flag that will harm sender reputation, and a soft bounce rate above 3% can signal a reputation problem rather than bad data. Transactional mail runs higher: in several regions, including North America, the report's transactional bounce rates sit above 2%. If you're past those lines, the email deliverability checklist covers the authentication and list hygiene work that brings them back down.

Act on your email marketing metrics with Acoustic

Book an Acoustic demo to see how the audience health dashboard helps you track contact engagement and audience growth by channel, date range, and consent group, without jumping between reports. Every figure on this page comes from the 2026 marketing benchmark report, which breaks each metric out by 16 industries and 8 regions.

Email marketing metrics FAQs

Should you compare your email marketing metrics by industry or by region?

Compare by send type first, then region, then industry, because the report finds that technology adoption and content strategy, "not industry category," determine outcomes, and that GDPR-regulated markets such as the UK and Ireland lead largely because consent rules produce cleaner lists. The full report breaks every metric out by 16 industries and 8 regions for the comparison once your mix of scheduled and automated sends is matched.

Do transactional emails need their own benchmarks?

Yes. Acoustic's 2026 benchmark report finds transactional messages behave differently: they achieve open rates nearly 15 percentage points higher than scheduled sends, and their unsubscribe rates are much lower across every region. The report recommends separating transactional and marketing mail by IP and sending domain.

What does it mean when both open rate and click-to-open rate are low?

It usually points to a systemic problem: the guidance in the report is that list quality, content relevance, and possibly deliverability all need attention, starting with list segmentation and a re-engagement campaign. Segments built on Acoustic's behavior and intent attributes update automatically as consumers engage or go quiet, which keeps that re-engagement audience current.