Email open rate benchmarks for B2B, with and without Apple's machine opens

This page is for B2B marketers and sales teams who send newsletters, nurture sequences and announcements, and want to know whether their numbers are normal. Every benchmark comes from the email platform's own published data, opened in October 2026, with its sample, period and how it counts an open. All of it is vendor research: only sending platforms see billions of emails. If your emails go to prospects who didn't subscribe, opens matter even less; see the cold email statistics, which use replies.

Email open rate benchmarks at a glance

The spread in the open rate column, from 20.73% to 43.46%, is mostly about counting. Brevo is the only platform that publishes open rates with and without Apple's automatic opens side by side, and its two numbers differ by 13 points. Click rates, which machines don't inflate the same way, sit between about 2% and 3% everywhere except ActiveCampaign, whose figure includes transactional email.

How Apple Mail Privacy Protection changed open rates

Apple announced Mail Privacy Protection (MPP) in June 2021, saying it "stops senders from using invisible pixels to collect information about the user" and keeps senders from knowing when someone opens an email. Litmus dates it from September 2021. Brevo describes the effect on senders: MPP "pre-fetches emails and registers an 'open' even if the recipient never views the message."

The scale is large:

• Apple's share of opens. Litmus counted Apple at 76.56% of the more than 1.5 billion opens it tracked in September 2026. Litmus includes privacy-impacted opens in that figure and says they aren't considered reliable opens.
• The measured inflation. Brevo's 2025 average was 20.73% without MPP opens and 33.87% with them, a 13-point gap. In North America the gap was 15 points: 17.32% against 32.49%.
• Click-to-open runs low. Because inflated opens sit in the denominator, MailerLite notes that your real click-to-open rate is higher than your dashboard shows.

What this means in practice: on a platform that counts MPP opens, your open rate largely reflects how many of your recipients use Apple Mail. A jump from one month to the next can come from a list change rather than a better subject line. Clicks, replies and conversions are what people actually did.

B2B email benchmarks by industry

Brevo is the best source for B2B industries if you want open rates without Apple's automatic opens. These are averages from 2025:

If your platform counts MPP opens, compare with figures that do too. Here are B2B industries across four platforms; labels differ, so match the closest one:

Mailchimp now shows only four industries publicly. GetResponse's industry table also lists an "All" row of 42.53%, which doesn't match the 39.64% in its own FAQ, a reminder to treat any single figure as approximate.

Click, click-to-open, unsubscribe and bounce benchmarks

Two more reference points from Brevo: its top 10% of senders averaged a 44.02% open rate (without MPP) and a 5.22% click-through rate. And MailerLite's unsubscribe rate more than doubled, from 0.08% in 2024 to 0.22% in 2025, which it links to Gmail's changes making it easier to unsubscribe.

What counts as a good open rate

1. Find out how your platform counts opens. Check whether it removes or flags Apple's automatic opens. This decides which benchmark applies.
2. If it excludes them, about 20% to 23% is typical for B2B industries (Brevo), North America runs lower (17.32%), and 30% or more is strong. Brevo's top 10% averaged 44.02%.
3. If it includes them, about 35% to 46% is typical for B2B industries (MailerLite medians), and the number tells you little on its own.
4. Judge campaigns on clicks. A click rate of about 2% of recipients is typical across platforms. Track it, and replies or conversions, campaign by campaign.

Inbox rules every B2B sender has to meet

Since February 2024, Gmail and Yahoo have enforced sender requirements, and Microsoft followed for Outlook.com in 2025. They're written for personal mailboxes, but they set the baseline for any sender.

Google says it began "ramping up its enforcement" in November 2025, with temporary and permanent rejections for mail that doesn't comply. A low open rate that arrives suddenly is often a deliverability problem, so check authentication and spam rate before you rewrite anything.

How to measure your own email benchmarks

Your own trend beats any platform average, because it reflects your list and your content. Use the same formulas every time:

Illustrative example. The company and numbers are invented to show the arithmetic.

Fieldstone Analytics (fieldstone.example) sends a monthly newsletter to 8,000 business contacts.

• 160 addresses bounce (2.0%), so 7,840 are delivered.
• The platform reports 3,100 unique opens: 3,100 / 7,840 = 39.5%. It flags 1,050 of them as Apple machine opens, leaving 2,050: 26.1%.
• 196 people click: a click rate of 196 / 7,840 = 2.5%. Click-to-open is 196 / 3,100 = 6.3% as reported, or 196 / 2,050 = 9.6% without machine opens.
• 18 people unsubscribe: 0.23%.

Against MailerLite's 43.46% median, Fieldstone's 39.5% looks below average. Against Brevo's 20.73% without MPP, its 26.1% looks strong. Same email, opposite conclusions, depending on the benchmark. The click rate settles it: 2.5% is a little above the 2.09% to 2.62% the platforms report.

Small lists swing by chance. On a list of 1,000, a 25% open rate can move about 3 points either way from one send to the next with nothing changed, so compare the average of several sends rather than one.

What these benchmarks can't tell you

• Each platform's customers are its sample. Most are small businesses, and many are B2C. Industry labels are chosen by the senders themselves.
• Averages and medians differ. MailerLite reports medians; Brevo reports unweighted averages with outliers removed; others don't say.
• Some data is old. Mailchimp's page was last updated in December 2023, GetResponse's report covers 2023 and Campaign Monitor's covers 2021, when MPP was only months old.
• Counting differs. Mailchimp uses unique opens. GetResponse says every subscriber action counts, including reopens. ActiveCampaign's click rate includes transactional email.

Widely quoted, but we couldn't trace the original

• Constant Contact's industry averages. They're repeated on many pages, but the original public page now redirects, so we couldn't check the figures or their date.
• "MPP affects 55% to 60% of all opens." We found this stated without a source. Litmus's own data shows Apple at 76.56% of the opens it tracks, which isn't the same measure.
• Single "average B2B open rate" figures on agency pages. The ones we checked blend other vendors' numbers without saying which counting method each used.

Next step: if your emails go to prospects rather than subscribers, the cold email statistics show reply rates and what moves them, and the cold email subject lines guide covers the line that gets them opened.