What's a Good Click-to-Open Rate for Email Marketing in 2026?

A good click-to-open rate (CTOR) for email marketing in 2026 is above roughly 6.8% — the global median reported in MailerLite's 2025 benchmark report, which tracked more than 3.6 million campaigns sent from 181,000 accounts between December 2024 and November 2025. That's up from a 5.63% median the year before.

What CTOR Measures That Open Rate and Click Rate Don't

Click-to-open rate measures clicks as a percentage of opens, not as a percentage of everyone who received the email. That makes it a cleaner read on whether your actual email content and call to action are working, separate from how many people opened the email in the first place. Open rate tells you whether your subject line and sender name got attention; CTOR tells you whether what's inside delivered once someone looked.

Why CTOR Is More Reliable Right Now

Open rate alone has become a noisier metric since Apple's Mail Privacy Protection and similar features in other mail clients began auto-opening emails to load tracking pixels, inflating open counts independent of genuine recipient engagement. CTOR isn't fully immune to that inflation either, since it's still built on the same open-rate denominator, but because a click requires active input from a real person, a low CTOR against an artificially high open rate is one of the clearer signals that opens are being overcounted by bots and privacy proxies rather than real interest.

The Broader 2025 Benchmark Context

MailerLite's report also found a global median click rate (clicks as a percentage of total emails sent, not opens) of 2.09%, and a median unsubscribe rate of 0.22% — more than double the prior year's 0.08%, which MailerLite links partly to Gmail's one-click unsubscribe feature making it easier for recipients to opt out without ever opening the email. The report covers medians, not averages, across 46 industries and 7 regions, though a full per-industry CTOR breakdown goes beyond what's summarized at the headline level.

What Actually Moves CTOR

List engagement and relevance drive CTOR more directly than list size does. A smaller, actively opted-in list that wants your content will generally post a higher CTOR than a larger, colder list, even when the larger list shows a bigger raw open count. Removing chronically unengaged subscribers — people who haven't opened or clicked anything in six to twelve months — tends to raise both open rate and CTOR at the same time, and MailerLite's own report attributes part of the year-over-year improvement in both 2025 metrics to exactly this kind of list hygiene becoming more common practice among senders.

How to Use This Benchmark

Pull your own CTOR for the last three to six months of campaigns and compare it against the 6.8% line, but weight that comparison by how engaged your list already is — a newly built list will generally run colder than a list that's been actively maintained and pruned for a year or more, so a below-benchmark CTOR on a young list isn't necessarily a content problem yet.

Bottom Line

Track CTOR alongside open rate rather than relying on open rate by itself, and treat anything under roughly 6-7% as a cue to audit your email content and CTA rather than your subject line. If your CTOR is climbing while your open rate stays flat, that's a sign your list quality is improving even if your headline open-rate number doesn't show it.

Sources: MailerLite, "Email Marketing Benchmarks" (2025 report, covering December 2024-November 2025, 3.6M+ campaigns, 181,000 accounts).