What's a Good Email Open Rate for Education and Training Companies?

A good email open rate for education and training companies is around 35.64%, with a 3.02% click rate, per Mailchimp's benchmark table for its "Education + Training" industry category — essentially identical to Mailchimp's 35.63% blended average across all industries on the same table, making this one of the closest-to-average categories Mailchimp tracks rather than a standout performer.

Where the 35.64% Figure Comes From

Mailchimp's benchmark table breaks down average open rate, click rate, and unsubscribe rate by industry category for accounts sending through its platform. For the "Education + Training" category specifically, Mailchimp reports a 35.64% open rate, a 3.02% click rate, and a 0.18% unsubscribe rate.

How Education and Training Compares to the All-Industry Average

• Open rate — 35.64%, just 0.01 points above Mailchimp's 35.63% all-users average, making this one of the most "average" categories on the table rather than a standout.
• Click rate — 3.02%, above the 2.62% all-users average, meaning education and training subscribers click through at a noticeably higher rate once they open an email than the typical Mailchimp sender's audience.
• Unsubscribe rate — 0.18%, below the 0.22% all-users average, suggesting education and training lists hold onto subscribers slightly better than average.

Why Click Rate Stands Out More Than Open Rate

An open rate sitting almost exactly at the all-industry average, paired with an above-average click rate, points to a list that opens emails at a typical rate but finds the content inside more actionable than most. Course reminders, enrollment deadlines, and certification or renewal notices all give a training-sector subscriber a concrete reason to click through rather than just skim the subject line, which likely explains the gap between an unremarkable open rate and a stronger-than-average click rate.

Why This Number Should Be Read With Caution

Mailchimp states its benchmark data was last updated in December 2023, and the company separately notes that Apple Mail Privacy Protection (MPP) — which automatically pre-loads tracking pixels for mail opened in Apple Mail regardless of whether a person actually reads it — inflates reported open rates across every industry on the table, education and training included. Independent analysis has found MPP accounts for roughly half of all tracked email opens industry-wide, so the real, human-read open rate for this category is almost certainly lower than the 35.64% headline figure suggests.

What to Track Alongside Open Rate

Because MPP makes raw open rate an increasingly unreliable signal on its own, click rate and unsubscribe rate are the more dependable numbers for an education or training sender to track over time. A program holding its 3.02%-range click rate steady while open rate drifts is a better sign of real engagement than the open rate number by itself.

What Drives Performance Within the Category

"Education + Training" spans a wide range of senders — universities, certification bodies, online course platforms, corporate training providers, and tutoring services — and transactional emails tied to a specific deadline, like an enrollment closing or a certification expiring, consistently outperform general newsletter-style sends within the same category, since recipients have an active reason to open and act. A sender blending time-sensitive transactional content with broad promotional newsletters into one list will see a blended rate that understates how well the deadline-driven content specifically performs.

Bottom Line

Use 35.64% as a directional open-rate benchmark for education and training email, but weight the 3.02% click rate more heavily when judging real engagement, since it sits further above the all-industry average than the open rate does. Re-check Mailchimp's benchmark table periodically, since the company's own published figures are dated December 2023 and newer data may shift the comparison.

Source: Mailchimp, "Email Marketing Benchmarks and Statistics by Industry" (mailchimp.com/resources/email-marketing-benchmarks).