Email Marketing Benchmarks by Business Size
Average Unique Open, Click, Bounce, and Abuse Complaint Rates by Company Size
Last updated December 2012
What’s the average open rate for email-marketing campaigns? What kind of click rates are other people in your industry getting? How many bounces are normal? How many spam complaints are too many? These are the kinds of questions you should be asking as an email marketer—learning the answers will help you improve your newsletters. MailChimp scanned hundreds of millions of email campaigns to get the stats. Here’s what we learned.
Average Email Campaign Stats of MailChimp Customers by Company Size
| Company Size |
Open Rate |
Click Rate |
Soft Rate |
Hard Rate |
Abuse Rate |
Unsub Rate |
| 1 to 10 |
30.7% |
3.6% |
0.4% |
0.4% |
0.032% |
0.166% |
| 11 to 25 |
25.2% |
2.7% |
0.4% |
0.3% |
0.029% |
0.136% |
| 26-50 |
29.8% |
3.5% |
0.5% |
0.4% |
0.029% |
0.145% |
| 50+ |
31.3% |
3.3% |
0.4% |
0.3% |
0.028% |
0.129% |
Tips for improving your stats
- When it comes to subject lines, boring works best. When you write your subject line, don’t sell what’s inside—tell what's inside. Read our study on writing effective subject lines.
- If you want people to open your emails, you have to get past their spam filters first. Avoid using spammy keywords and phrases, and avoid using ALL CAPS or too many exclamation points!!! The best way to avoid spam filters is to learn how they work.
- Too many hard bounces is a sign of an old, stale list. People change email addresses every few months. Make sure you keep in touch with your subscribers regularly (at least once a quarter), so they can stay on your list.
- Soft bounces usually mean the recipient is “temporarily unavailable.” Maybe they’re on vacation, or their mailbox is full. You can keep those emails and try them again later, but MailChimp auto-cleans soft bounces after five failed campaigns.
- Hard bounces mean an email address failed. Maybe it no longer exists, or maybe someone made a typo when they subscribed to a list. But hard bounces might also be spam filter —if you see an abnormally high number of bounces after a campaign, read your bounceback records for any messages or clues from spam filters Here’s how to do that in MailChimp.
- Abuse complaints happen when recipients click the “This is spam” button in their email programs. That usually means they don’t remember you. Make sure your “From” and “Subject” lines contain your company name, so your subscribers will instantly recognize you. Here are a few more tips for preventing spam complaints.