What's a Good Email Open Rate for Health and Fitness Businesses in 2026?

Health and fitness businesses see an average email open rate of 47.81% in 2025 — well above the 43.46% cross-industry average — according to MailerLite's Email Marketing Benchmarks report, which analyzed platform send data across 46 industries and 7 regions.

Where This Number Comes From

MailerLite's benchmark report pulls from its own platform send data across 46 industries and 7 regions for 2025, with a cross-industry average open rate of 43.46% — up slightly from 42.35% in 2024. As MailerLite notes, Apple Mail Privacy Protection automatically marks emails opened by Apple Mail clients as read regardless of whether a person actually viewed them, which inflates reported open rates across every industry in the report, including this one.

Open Rate vs. Click Rate: A Revealing Gap

Health and fitness's 47.81% open rate is one of the stronger performances in MailerLite's report, but its click rate tells a different story: 1.45%, below the 2.09% cross-industry average. That combination — above-average opens, below-average clicks — suggests subscribers in this category are curious enough to open fitness emails but often don't find a specific action worth clicking on, a pattern consistent with newsletters and general content updates that lack a clear next step.

What Drives Strong Open Rates in This Category

Fitness and wellness subscribers tend to opt in with high intent — signing up for a specific program, class schedule, or membership — which produces a more engaged list than industries relying on broader, colder acquisition. That selection effect is a common explanation for why niche, intent-driven categories like health and fitness consistently outperform broader retail or travel lists on open rate even when overall list sizes are smaller.

How to Read This Benchmark

Because Apple Mail Privacy Protection inflates open rate broadly, don't treat 47.81% as the ceiling for engagement quality — treat it as a same-methodology comparison point against the 43.46% all-industry average and against your own historical performance measured the same way. Click rate, at 1.45%, is the more meaningful signal for whether your content is actually driving action, since it isn't affected by Apple's automatic-open behavior in the same way.

What to Do With a Below-Benchmark Open Rate

If your health and fitness list is opening well below 47.81%, the more likely culprits are subject line specificity and sender reputation rather than content quality, since this category's subscribers have already demonstrated above-average willingness to open. Testing more concrete, benefit-led subject lines against generic ones is a reasonable first step before assuming your list itself is disengaged, and a straightforward one to run given how directly it isolates subject-line performance from everything else in the send.

Bottom Line

If your health and fitness email list is opening below 47.81%, that's a stronger signal of a list quality or subject line problem than industry norms would suggest; if you're opening near or above it but clicking below 1.45%, focus on adding one clear, specific call to action per send rather than trying to push opens any higher.

Sources: MailerLite, "Email Marketing Benchmarks 2025," based on platform send data across 46 industries and 7 regions.