Email marketing benchmarks for service businesses

Current email marketing benchmarks put average open rates in the high 30s to low 40s (as a percentage of delivered emails), click rates around 2% to 2.6% and unsubscribe rates near 0.2%. The two large public datasets in this report agree on clicks and unsubscribes and differ on opens, which is expected given how open tracking now works.

MailerLite published benchmarks covering December 2024 to November 2025, built from more than 3.6 million campaigns sent by 181,000 approved accounts, reported as medians. Mailchimp publishes averages from campaigns sent to at least 1,000 subscribers, with data last updated in December 2023.

In MailerLite's 2025 data, open rates for service industries ranged from about 38% to 48%, and click rates ranged far more widely, from under 1% to almost 5%. Legal and construction stood out for clicks. Beauty and personal care, restaurants and insurance had click rates well under the overall median.

Use the industry row as a rough reference. Your list size, how the list was built and what you send (offers, reminders, education, newsletters) affect results more than the industry label does.

Open rates are no longer reliable because Apple's Mail Privacy Protection records many emails as opened whether or not a person read them. Apple announced the feature on June 7, 2021, describing it as stopping "senders from using invisible pixels to collect information about the user" and helping users "prevent senders from knowing when they open an email." To do that, Apple loads email content in the background, which fires the tracking pixel that platforms count as an open.

The share of opens affected is large. Litmus, which measures email client share from more than 1.5 billion opens, reported for September 2026 that Apple clients accounted for 76.56% of tracked opens, and its key takeaways say Mail Privacy Protection now affects roughly 55% to 60% of all email opens. Litmus states that these privacy opens "are not considered reliable opens." MailerLite notes the same effect in its benchmarks: reported open rates run higher than real ones.

That also explains part of the gap between the two benchmark sets. Mailchimp's figures date to 2023, MailerLite's to 2025, they use different statistics (averages versus medians) and they come from different customer bases.

Trust the metrics that require a person to act. MailerLite calls click rate the most accurate engagement indicator because it does not depend on open tracking. For a service business, the metrics that matter most sit further down the funnel than clicks:

• Click rate: share of delivered emails where someone clicked a link. Compare against your own last ten sends and against the industry row above.
• Replies: for consultative services (legal, financial, consulting), a reply asking a question is often worth more than a click.
• Bookings or inquiries attributed to the email: tag links so your booking system or CRM records the source.
• Unsubscribe rate: both datasets put the overall figure at 0.22%. A send that runs well above your normal rate tells you the content or frequency missed.
• List growth and bounces: a shrinking or bouncing list hurts deliverability and needs list cleaning.

The benchmarks suggest that relevance drives clicks more than industry does, which points to segmentation. HubSpot's 2026 State of Marketing report, based on a survey of more than 1,500 marketers, found 93.2% said personalized or segmented experiences led to more leads and purchases. That figure covers marketing broadly, not email alone, but email is where most service businesses can segment most easily.

Practical segments for a service business: active clients versus past clients, service type (a med spa's injectable clients versus facial clients), last visit date, and leads who inquired but never booked. A reminder that a client is due for a service tends to outperform a general newsletter, because it is about them.

Most platforms calculate each rate as a share of delivered emails, not emails sent, so bounced addresses are removed first. Definitions vary slightly between platforms, which is one reason the same campaign can look different in two tools. Check the definitions in your own platform before comparing against a benchmark.

Common definitions used by email platforms:

• Open rate: unique opens divided by delivered emails. Inflated by privacy opens, as covered above.
• Click rate: unique clickers divided by delivered emails. This is the figure in the industry table.
• Click-to-open rate: unique clickers divided by unique opens. It measures how well the content performed once opened, but it is also distorted by privacy opens, because inflated opens push it down.
• Unsubscribe rate: unsubscribes divided by delivered emails for that campaign.
• Bounce rate: emails that could not be delivered divided by emails sent. Hard bounces (addresses that do not exist) should be removed from the list right away.

Benchmarks differ between platforms because each one measures its own customers, in its own period, with its own statistic. Mailchimp reports averages from campaigns sent to at least 1,000 subscribers and notes its figures were last updated in December 2023. MailerLite reports medians across 2025. An average gets pulled up by a few very high performers, while a median shows the middle campaign, so the two can diverge even on the same data.

Customer mix matters too. A platform popular with nonprofits, creators or ecommerce stores will produce different overall figures than one used mainly by professional firms. For a service business, the industry rows and your own trend line are more useful than either overall average.

Use benchmarks as a sanity check and your own history as the real target. A practical approach:

• Stop reporting open rate as the headline number. Keep it as a rough signal for subject line tests within the same list, where Apple's effect is roughly constant.
• Set your baseline on click rate and bookings. Take your last ten campaigns, find your median click rate, and aim to beat it.
• Compare to the right industry row. A beauty business at 1.5% clicks is well ahead of MailerLite's 0.95% median for its industry, even though it trails the overall median.
• Watch unsubscribes per send. Spikes point to frequency or relevance problems.
• Segment before you add volume. A smaller send to the right group beats a larger send to everyone.
• Connect email to outcomes. Tag links and track which campaigns lead to booked appointments, consultations or signed engagements.

Report email performance by pulling click, reply and booking data into the same view as your other channels, so you can see which campaigns produce revenue rather than which ones produce opens. Most email platforms export click data, and most booking systems and CRMs record a source field if links are tagged.

Monvell's Marketing and Data + Reporting work covers both sides: building segmented email programs and setting up reporting that ties each campaign to the bookings it produced.