B2B newsletter benchmarks: open rate, click rate and cadence

Third-party vendor numbers today. Sawa's own dataset next.

Is there a single B2B newsletter benchmark?

No. The numbers that circulate as "the industry average" come from email platforms reporting on their own customers. Each platform has a different customer mix, a different data year and different rules about which campaigns count. Some report an average, some report what they call a "good" rate, and none of them publishes a segment that cleanly means "B2B company newsletter."

That makes the vendor figures useful as a rough range, not a target. This page collects them per metric, with the year, the segment and the caveat beside every number, so you can see how wide the range really is. For a deeper look at the open rate alone, see our B2B newsletter open rate benchmarks.

What is a good open rate for a B2B newsletter?

Vendor-reported averages span almost twenty points. The spread says more about the vendors than about newsletters. The closest segments to B2B are Mailchimp's Business and Finance, Campaign Monitor's Professional Services and IT, Tech and Software, and GetResponse's Agencies and Technology rows.

What is a good click rate?

Click rate is the more trustworthy of the two headline metrics, because a click needs a person to act. Constant Contact's documentation defines it as unique clickers divided by delivered emails (sends minus bounces), and most platforms use something close to that. Click-to-open rate divides clicks by opens instead, so it inherits every problem the open count has.

Notice how Klaviyo's flow figure is more than three times its campaign figure. A flow is an automated series triggered by something a person did, such as signing up. A newsletter is a scheduled send to everyone. Mixing those two in one benchmark is one of the most common ways to end up measuring against the wrong number. Which metrics deserve your attention is covered in newsletter metrics that matter.

What is a normal unsubscribe rate?

Unsubscribe rates are small numbers and the vendors agree more closely here. A rising unsubscribe rate across several issues is a clearer warning sign than a single low open rate.

How often do B2B companies send newsletters?

Most benchmark pages say little about cadence. Mailchimp advises avoiding excessive frequency and notes that list size shapes how many emails each person receives. Campaign Monitor suggests testing send cadence, daily against weekly, rather than naming a winner. Klaviyo says relevance and timing outweigh frequency and gives no schedule.

GetResponse is the exception. Its 2023 report breaks results down by newsletters sent per week across its own customers. Most of its senders, 46.77 percent, send one newsletter a week, and a further 19.54 percent send two. Reported open rate was highest at one a week, 48.31 percent, and click-through rate was also highest there at 5.71 percent. At two a week those fell to 43.2 and 4.73 percent, and at sixteen or more a week to 32.15 and 3.75 percent. GetResponse reads its own data as pointing to two newsletters a week being optimal.

Treat this as a description of GetResponse's customers, many of whom are not B2B. The rates per week also do not prove that sending less causes higher engagement; senders who mail once a week may simply be a different kind of company. For B2B the practical question is what your team can produce well and what readers signed up for. Our newsletter frequency framework walks through that decision, and the guide to running a B2B newsletter covers the production side.

How should you read these numbers?

Apple Mail Privacy Protection changed what an open means

Platforms record an open when a hidden image in the email is loaded. Mailchimp's documentation explains that this tiny invisible graphic is how open tracking works, that it fails in plain-text emails or when images are off, and that clicks from bots and spam filters are counted as opens too. Apple's Mail Privacy Protection, as Apple describes it, hides the reader's IP address and prevents senders from seeing whether the email was opened. The practical effect is that open counts can be inflated or hidden depending on the mail client. Mailchimp itself notes that its open rate accuracy may be affected by the feature and recommends excluding Apple MPP and bot activity from reports. GetResponse goes further and attributes part of the growth in its reported engagement to the popularity of Apple devices.

Each vendor has a different customer mix

Mailchimp says its customers range from one-person startups to Fortune 500 companies. Klaviyo's data is ecommerce brands. beehiiv's is newsletter publishers. Campaign Monitor averages across all campaigns regardless of industry. None of these is a sample of B2B companies sending a newsletter to prospects and customers, so a B2B team can sit well outside any of these averages and be doing fine.

Segment labels do not line up

"Business and Finance," "Professional Services," "Agencies" and "Technology and High Tech" are self-selected categories, chosen by whoever set up the account. They are not the same thing, and the same company could land in different rows on different platforms. Compare within one vendor's table, never across tables.

Years differ

Campaign Monitor's figures are 2021 data. Mailchimp's page was last updated December 2023. GetResponse covers 2023. Klaviyo and beehiiv report on 2025 and 2026. Apple's privacy change landed in 2021, so a 2021 figure and a 2025 figure were produced under different measurement conditions.

How do you compare yourself?

Use the vendor range as a loose boundary and your own history as the real benchmark. Three steps:

1. 1. Clean your own numbers first. Turn on your platform's bot and Apple MPP filtering if it offers it. Pull the last twelve issues. Record delivered, unique clicks, replies and unsubscribes per issue. Treat opens as a rough signal, not a score.
2. 2. Pick the one vendor row that fits you best. Choose the platform you actually send from, if it publishes a benchmark, and the segment closest to your company. Note its year and its counting rule. That single row is your outside reference. Do not average rows across vendors.
3. 3. Set your target against your own trend. If your click rate is below the row, aim to beat your own median over the next quarter, not to jump to the vendor figure. If it is above, keep the same discipline. A steady unsubscribe rate and a rising reply count matter more than closing a gap to someone else's customers.

What Sawa will publish here

This page is meant to carry Sawa's own benchmark data once there is enough of it to be useful. The plan is a table of anonymised rows across client newsletters, each with the sample size and the date range it covers, measured with bot filtering on and opens reported separately from clicks. Until that table exists, nothing on this page is Sawa data, and the vendor labels on every table stay in place.

Refresh schedule: quarterly. Each refresh re-fetches every vendor page, updates any figure that changed, and bumps the updated date at the top of the page.

Need help with this? See how Sawa handles newsletters and engagement, or book an intro call.