What's a Good Email Open Rate for Financial Services Companies in 2026?

A good email open rate for financial services companies in 2026 is around 31.35%, the figure Mailchimp's published benchmark table lists for its "Business and Finance" sending category — slightly below Mailchimp's own blended average of 35.63% across all industries on the same table, but still a solid rate by cross-industry standards.

Where the 31.35% 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 "Business and Finance" category specifically, Mailchimp reports a 31.35% open rate, a 2.78% click rate, and a 0.15% unsubscribe rate.

How Finance Compares on Click Rate and Unsubscribe Rate

• Click rate — Business and Finance senders see a 2.78% click rate, slightly above Mailchimp's 2.62% all-users average, despite the lower-than-average open rate.
• Unsubscribe rate — Business and Finance senders see a 0.15% unsubscribe rate, well below the 0.22% all-users average.
• What that combination suggests — a financial services list that opens somewhat less often but clicks more and unsubscribes less looks like a smaller, more qualified, more engaged audience rather than a weaker one. The open rate number alone understates how the list actually performs.

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, financial services 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 financial services email is almost certainly meaningfully lower than the 31.35% headline figure suggests.

What to Track Alongside Open Rate

Because MPP makes raw open rate an increasingly unreliable signal on its own, click-through rate and unsubscribe rate are the more dependable numbers for a financial services sender to track over time. A financial services campaign holding its 2.78%-range click rate steady while open rate drifts up or down is a better sign of real engagement than the open rate number by itself.

What Drives Performance Within the Category

Financial services covers a wide range of senders — banks, insurers, wealth managers, fintech apps, accounting firms — and transactional or account-related emails (statements, fraud alerts, policy renewals) consistently outperform promotional newsletters within the same category, since recipients expect and look for that content regardless of general inbox fatigue. A sender blending both email types into one blast list will see a blended rate that understates how well its transactional content specifically performs.

Bottom Line

Use 31.35% as a directional benchmark for financial services email open rate, but weight the 2.78% click rate more heavily when judging real engagement. 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).