What is a good open rate for a B2B newsletter?

Vendors report 21 to 36 percent. Trust clicks more than opens.

What do the vendor benchmarks actually say?

Three email platforms publish benchmark pages built from their own customers' sending. None of them is a neutral industry study. Each one counts the emails that went through its own system, in its own period, with its own rules about which campaigns count. So read each row below as "what that vendor's customers saw that year", and nothing more.

Two things stand out. First, no vendor has a clean "B2B newsletter" segment. Mailchimp's nearest row is Business and Finance. Campaign Monitor offers Professional Services and a combined IT, Tech and Software row. Klaviyo's report is explicitly for ecommerce, so it is in the table as a reference for how the metric behaves, not for your audience. Second, the gap between vendors is wider than the gap between industries inside any one vendor. That tells you the method matters more than the sector.

Why do the numbers disagree so much?

Four reasons, and none of them is about your readers.

Different years

Campaign Monitor's figures come from emails sent in 2021. Mailchimp's table was last updated at the end of 2023. Klaviyo's is labelled 2026. Open tracking changed a lot across that span, so the older dataset shows lower opens partly because of how opens were counted at the time, not only because people read less.

Different customers

Mailchimp says its customers range from one-person startups to Fortune 500 companies. Klaviyo serves online stores. Campaign Monitor averages across every campaign on its platforms regardless of industry. A B2B company sending a monthly analysis to a few thousand professionals sits at the edge of all three populations.

Different counting rules

Mailchimp only includes campaigns that went to at least 1,000 subscribers. That removes small lists, which often have higher engagement, from the average. Each vendor also decides whether to filter out automated opens, and the pages do not all say what they did.

Different definitions

Mailchimp's page shows one open rate in its table and a slightly different one in its FAQ without explaining the gap. Klaviyo separates campaigns from automated flows, and the flow figures are far higher. If you copy a number from a vendor page, you are also copying a definition you may not share.

Why is the open rate unreliable?

An open is not a person reading. It is a tiny, invisible image loading. Mailchimp explains that it places a unique hidden graphic at the bottom of each HTML email, and counts an open when that graphic is downloaded from its server. That one mechanism causes problems in both directions.

Opens get undercounted when the image never loads. Mailchimp notes that open tracking cannot work in plain-text emails, or when a recipient or their email client has chosen not to display images. Corporate mail systems can block images by default, which matters for a B2B list.

Opens get overcounted when something other than a reader loads the image. Apple's own support page says Mail Privacy Protection hides the reader's IP address and prevents senders from seeing whether an email was opened. The way Apple achieves that can register as an open regardless of what the reader did. Mailchimp's help page goes further: it recommends excluding Apple Mail Privacy Protection and other bot activity from reports, and warns that its system records clicks from bots and spam filters as opens, which can produce an unusually high open count. Mailchimp's own benchmark page carries the same caveat, saying open rate accuracy may be affected by Apple's privacy changes.

Put simply: a blocked image hides a real reader, and a privacy proxy invents a fake one. The open rate you see is the net of those two errors, and you cannot tell from the number alone which one is winning.

What should you measure instead?

Two click metrics do most of the work. They are not perfect, but a click needs a deliberate action, which an image load does not.

Click rate

Click rate is the share of delivered recipients who clicked any link. Constant Contact's help page defines it as unique clickers divided by sends minus bounces. For reference, Campaign Monitor's 2021 average was 2.3%, Mailchimp's all-user figure was 2.62%, and Klaviyo's campaign figure was 1.69%. Those are far closer to each other than the open rates are, which is one more sign that clicks are the steadier signal.

Click-to-open rate

Click-to-open rate is clicks divided by opens. It asks: of the people who did open, how many found something worth clicking? Campaign Monitor's 2021 average was 10.5%. One caution: since opens sit in the denominator, inflated opens push this number down even when the content is fine. Read it as a trend on your own list, not as a comparison across vendors.

Replies, unsubscribes and next steps

For a B2B newsletter, the signals that matter most do not appear on the benchmark pages at all: replies, meetings booked, demo requests, and unsubscribes after each issue. We cover how to weight them in the newsletter metrics that matter.

So what counts as "good" for a B2B newsletter?

Good is relative to how the list was built. A list grown from a lead magnet that promised a specific guide tends to open and click more than a list assembled from old event sign-ups or exported CRM contacts. A list of corporate addresses behaves differently from a list of personal addresses, because corporate mail security can block images and scan links. A weekly send and a quarterly send set different expectations, which is why cadence belongs in this conversation too; see how often a B2B company should send.

Sawa does not yet publish its own benchmark. We run newsletters for B2B clients inside their own email platforms, and the anonymised ranges will go into the table above once there is enough history to be honest about. Until then, the practical rule is this: if your click rate and reply count hold steady or rise issue over issue, your open rate is not the problem, whatever the vendor table says. This is the kind of judgement that sits inside how Sawa runs a newsletter.

What to do if your open rate is lower than the benchmark

Work through these in order. The first three are about measurement and delivery, and they explain most low open rates before a single word of copy is involved.

1. Check what the number is counting. If your platform can filter Apple Mail and bot activity, turn that on and compare like with like. A benchmark that includes automated opens is not comparable with a report that excludes them.
2. Compare against your own history first. Pull the last several issues and look at open rate, click rate and unsubscribes side by side. A number that is stable for you is a baseline, not a failure, even if it sits below a vendor's average.
3. Rule out a delivery problem. A sudden drop in opens with no change in content usually means messages stopped reaching the inbox. Check bounces, complaints and your domain authentication before touching the newsletter itself.
4. Look at who is on the list. Contacts who never asked for the newsletter, imported lists and stale event sign-ups drag the average down. Segment them out and read the rate for people who actively subscribed.
5. Fix the sender name and subject line. The from name should be a person or a brand readers recognise, and the subject should promise one specific thing. See how to write newsletter subject lines.
6. Match cadence to the promise. If sign-ups expected a monthly digest and get a weekly send, opens fall. Say the schedule on the sign-up page and in the welcome email, then keep to it.
7. Re-engage or remove inactive subscribers. Send a short series asking inactive readers whether they still want the newsletter, then remove those who do not respond. The open rate rises because the denominator is honest again, and deliverability usually improves with it. Our re-engagement sequence template is a starting point.
8. Change one thing at a time. Test a sender name, a subject style or a send time over a few issues, and judge it on clicks and replies as well as opens. If everything changes at once, nothing is learned.

How to use a benchmark without being misled

Three rules. Use the vendor you actually send from, because its counting rules match your report. Read the segment closest to your audience, and accept that for B2B it will be a loose fit. And treat the number as a sanity check, not a goal: if you are far below it, look for a delivery or list problem; if you are far above it, check that the opens are real. For the full picture of what a newsletter programme looks like week to week, see how to run a B2B newsletter.

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