What's a Good Email Open Rate for Hardware and Home Improvement Brands?

A good email open rate for a hardware or home improvement brand is around 49.5%, with a click rate near 1.28%, based on MailerLite's 2025 benchmark report covering over 3.6 million campaigns sent from 181,000 accounts. That's well above the 43.46% open rate average across all industries measured in the same report.

How the Category Compares to the All-Industry Average

• Hardware & Home Improvement open rate — 49.5%, about 6 points above the 43.46% all-industry average for 2025.
• Hardware & Home Improvement click rate — 1.28%, below the 2.09% all-industry average click rate.
• The gap between the two metrics — a high open rate paired with a below-average click rate suggests subject lines and sender reputation are working well for this category, while the emails themselves may be under-delivering on driving clicks once opened.

Why This Category Tends to Open Well

Home improvement and hardware purchases are frequently tied to a specific ongoing project — a renovation, a repair, a seasonal task — which gives subscribers an active reason to open emails about relevant products, promotions, or how-to content rather than archiving them unopened. Seasonal timing also plays a role: campaigns tied to spring planting, fall weatherproofing, or holiday project sales tend to land when recipients are already thinking about the category, which lifts open rates independent of subject-line quality.

Why the Click Rate Lags

A below-average click rate alongside an above-average open rate points toward either broad, catalog-style emails that don't give any single recipient a clear reason to click, or a mismatch between what gets someone to open the email and what the email itself offers once opened. Home improvement retailers sending the same broad promotional blast to an entire list, rather than segmenting by project type or past purchase category, are the most likely candidates for this pattern.

What the Report Measured

The MailerLite benchmark draws from a full year of campaign data, December 2024 through November 2025, across 46 separate industries and 7 regions, which makes it one of the larger sample sizes available for industry-level email benchmarking rather than a single-vendor's customer base alone. The 43.46% all-industry open rate average for 2025 was itself a small increase from 42.35% in 2024, and the 2.09% all-industry click rate average rose slightly from 2% the year before.

Bottom Line

If your hardware or home improvement email program is clearing roughly 49.5% opens but falling short on the 1.28% click benchmark, the fix is more likely in segmentation and offer relevance than in subject lines — test splitting broad promotional sends by project category or past purchase history before touching send times or subject-line copy.

Source: MailerLite, "Compare Your Email Performance Metrics: Industry Benchmarks" 2025 report (mailerlite.com/blog/compare-your-email-performance-metrics-industry-benchmarks).