If you've searched for what a good email open rate looks like, you've probably found a dozen articles quoting numbers in the 20-25% range. Maybe you saw Klaviyo's benchmark report claiming averages closer to 40%. Maybe your own account shows 55% and you thought things were going great, or it shows 12% and you've been quietly panicking.

Here's the problem: most of those numbers are wrong. Not intentionally misleading, just outdated. The way email opens get measured changed fundamentally in September 2021, and the industry still hasn't caught up. Benchmarks published in 2026 are still built on data that includes millions of fake opens.

This article breaks down what's actually happening with open rates today, why the benchmarks you're reading don't reflect reality anymore, and what numbers you should be targeting instead if you run an e-commerce email program.

What broke open rates (and why they haven't recovered)

In September 2021, Apple released Mail Privacy Protection (MPP) as part of iOS 15. The feature pre-loads email content and tracking pixels for anyone using Apple Mail, regardless of whether they actually read the message.

Before MPP, an open was a signal. Someone received your email, opened it, and their email client loaded the tracking pixel. After MPP, an open means Apple's servers downloaded the pixel. The person might have read it. They might have deleted it without looking. They might not even use that email address anymore. You have no way to tell.

The scale of this is hard to overstate. Apple Mail handles roughly 50-60% of all consumer email opens globally. On some e-commerce lists, that number climbs closer to 70%. When more than half your opens are machine-generated, your open rate stops being a measure of engagement and becomes a measure of how many subscribers use iPhones. For brands with younger, more affluent customer bases, the Apple Mail share is even higher, making the distortion worse for exactly the accounts that tend to care most about their metrics.

Klaviyo, Mailchimp, and other platforms added MPP filtering to try to separate real opens from machine opens. These filters help, but they're approximations. They use heuristics like IP address matching and timing patterns, and they don't catch everything. Filtered open rates are better than unfiltered ones, but they're still inflated compared to pre-MPP reality.

What the published benchmarks say (and why they're misleading)

Klaviyo's own ecommerce benchmark report is the most cited source in the Klaviyo ecosystem. It reports average open rates in the 35-45% range for e-commerce campaigns. Those numbers look encouraging until you understand how they're calculated.

The benchmark data includes MPP opens. Even with Klaviyo's filtering, a significant portion of reported opens are machine-generated. The report also skews toward well-segmented senders (brands that send to engaged segments report higher open rates by definition) and doesn't account for list quality differences between a 5,000-person niche list and a 500,000-person mass-market list.

Other sources aren't much better. Mailchimp's benchmarks are based on their user base, which leans heavily toward small businesses and newsletters. Campaign Monitor publishes industry averages that blend B2B and B2C senders. None of these sources publish post-MPP adjusted numbers because, frankly, the adjusted numbers would make email marketing look less impressive, and that's bad for their business.

The result: marketers are comparing their numbers against inflated benchmarks and either feeling falsely confident or unnecessarily worried. Neither response leads to good decisions. If you think your email program is thriving because your open rate is 45%, you might be ignoring deliverability problems that are quietly eroding your sender reputation.

What a good email open rate actually looks like in 2026

Based on the accounts I've worked with and data shared across practitioner communities, here's what realistic open rates look like after accounting for MPP inflation:

Campaign open rates (filtered, segmented sends)

Well-segmented send to 90-day engaged contacts: 25-35% filtered open rate
Broad send to full list: 15-22% filtered open rate
Win-back or re-engagement campaign: 8-15% filtered open rate

If your filtered campaign open rates are consistently above 35%, you're either doing exceptional work with segmentation and content, or your MPP filtering isn't catching everything. Both are possible, but the second is more common. Check your Apple Mail subscriber percentage before celebrating.

Flow open rates (automated sequences)

Welcome series (email 1): 40-55% filtered open rate. This is legitimately high because the subscriber just opted in.
Abandoned cart (email 1): 35-45% filtered open rate. Strong intent signal drives genuine engagement.
Post-purchase follow-up: 30-40% filtered open rate
Win-back flow: 12-20% filtered open rate. If this seems low, remember that you're emailing people who stopped engaging. That's the whole point.

What these numbers mean for you

If your campaign open rates sit between 20-30% on filtered, segmented sends, you're performing normally. You're not broken. You're not behind. The benchmarks that made you think you should be at 45% were always inflated.

If your rates are below 15% on engaged segments, that's worth investigating. Check your deliverability (delivery rate, spam complaint rate) before you blame your subject lines. Poor inbox placement is a more common cause of low opens than poor copy.

What to track instead of open rates

Open rates were already an imperfect metric before MPP. Now they're unreliable enough that building strategy around them is a mistake. Here's what to focus on instead:

Click rate (filtered for bots)

Click rate is the closest replacement for open rate as an engagement signal. A click requires a real human to take action. But there's a catch: Klaviyo's bot click filter (rolled out in 2024) dramatically changed reported click rates overnight. Many accounts saw click rates drop 50-80% when bot filtering went live. If you haven't enabled this filter, your click rates are inflated.

Realistic filtered click rates for e-commerce campaigns: 1.5-3.5% on segmented sends, though this varies by industry and list quality. For flows: welcome series 8-12%, abandoned cart 3-6%, post-purchase 2-4%. These numbers look small compared to the pre-filter era, but they represent actual humans clicking actual links. That's the number you want to optimize for.

Revenue per recipient

This is the metric that connects engagement to business outcomes. How much revenue does each email generate per person who received it? RPR doesn't care about fake opens or bot clicks. It only counts money. If your RPR is stable or growing, your email program is healthy regardless of what your open rate says.

Placed order rate

The ultimate engagement metric for e-commerce: what percentage of recipients bought something? Track this by segment and by flow to understand where your email program is genuinely driving revenue. A 0.3-0.5% placed order rate on campaigns is solid. For abandoned cart flows, 3-5% is normal.

How to explain declining open rates to your boss or client

This is the real challenge. Numbers went down. Someone wants to know why. Here's the conversation framework:

First, separate the signal from the noise. Pull up revenue per recipient alongside open rates for the past 12 months. In most accounts, RPR has stayed flat or improved while open rates declined. That tells you the program isn't broken. The measurement changed.

Second, show the Apple Mail percentage. In Klaviyo, you can segment by email client. Show what percentage of your list uses Apple Mail. If it's 50%+, the open rate decline has a clear mechanical explanation that has nothing to do with your team's performance.

Third, reframe the KPIs going forward. Propose tracking click rate (filtered), RPR, and placed order rate as primary metrics. Keep open rate as a directional trend indicator, not a success metric. This isn't moving the goalposts. It's acknowledging that the old goal was never accurate to begin with.

A useful analogy: open rates in 2026 are like step counters that also count when your phone bounces in your bag. The number looks higher than reality. Switching to a better metric isn't admitting failure. It's getting a more accurate measurement.

One more thing worth understanding: open rate benchmarks vary wildly by industry even when measured accurately. Fashion and beauty brands tend to see higher engagement than B2B SaaS companies, because people actually want to browse clothing. Food and beverage lists run hot because purchase frequency is high. Home goods and furniture tend to run lower because people buy a couch once every five years, not once a month. Comparing your rates to a cross-industry average is comparing apples to couches. Find benchmarks from your specific vertical, adjust them downward for MPP inflation, and use that as your baseline.

What actually moves engagement in the right direction

If you want to improve the metrics that matter (clicks, conversions, revenue), here's where to focus your energy:

Segment harder. Send to 90-day engaged instead of 180-day. Your list will be smaller and your results will be better. The 600-account Klaviyo manager on Reddit puts it directly: clean cold profiles every 30-45 days.
Fix your welcome series first. It's your highest-engagement touchpoint. If your welcome flow click rate is below 8%, the problem is usually timing (sending too late after signup) or relevance (generic content instead of personalized onboarding).
Stop optimizing subject lines in isolation. Subject lines affect opens, and opens are unreliable. Optimize your email content and CTAs to improve click rate instead. A/B test the body, not just the headline.
Monitor deliverability continuously. A 2% drop in delivery rate will hurt your engagement metrics more than any subject line change will help them. Keep delivery rate above 98% and spam complaints below 0.08%.

None of this is glamorous. Segmentation, list hygiene, and deliverability monitoring don't make for exciting strategy presentations. But they're what actually works in an environment where half your measurement data is noise. The brands that win at email in 2026 aren't the ones chasing higher open rates. They're the ones who stopped caring about open rates and started tracking what their emails actually produce.

🚀 SPARKCRM monitors your Klaviyo engagement metrics in real time: click rates (filtered), deliverability signals, flow performance, and revenue trends. When something shifts, you get an alert before it becomes a problem.

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