Email Marketing Benchmarks for Nonprofits and B2B in 2026

It's normal for organizations to want to know how their marketing stacks up against their peers, and email marketing is no exception. That's what benchmarks are for. There are a lot of sources out there willing to hand you a number, and just as many opinions on which number actually matters. In this piece, we're going to dig into the ones that count.

What Are Good Open and Click Rates for Nonprofits and B2B in 2026?

Every discovery call eventually gets to the same question. Whether I'm on a call with a nonprofit executive director or a B2B marketing lead, someone asks me: "Is our open rate actually good?" I give the same answer on every call, every time: Open rate is only one data point. Don't stop at the surface number.

When it comes to industry benchmarks for email, most marketers refer to opens and clicks because those are the two metrics every platform tracks and reports. The number that actually matters most, however, is engagement, which doesn't have a clean industry benchmark at all, because every organization measures it differently: replies, forwards, time spent, repeat clicks, whatever signals matter to your program. That's a bigger conversation than this article can cover, so for today, if you need a single, comparable data point to measure against, click rate is very often the one worth using.

Click rate, the metric that beats the overall email marketing industry average across nonprofit, education, and B2B alike, no exceptions. But treat it as the starting point, not the finish line. A good click rate tells you people are paying attention. It doesn't tell you the whole story of whether they're actually engaged with your organization. According to Mailchimp's published benchmark page, which pulls from the accounts on its own platform and updates as new data becomes available, nonprofit email campaigns average a 3.27% click rate against a 2.62% cross-industry average, the strongest showing of any sector Mailchimp tracks. Education and training organizations, the nearest available proxy for higher education since no benchmark report publishes a higher-ed-specific category, follow at 3.02%. Business and finance, the closest stand-in for B2B, comes in at 2.78%, still ahead of the average even though its open rate isn't.

Open rates tell a messier story, and we'll get to why in a minute, but the click rate metrics are the ones you can trust without a caveat.

Why Benchmark Numbers Vary So Much by Source

If you look across different providers and reports, you'll see different benchmarks for the typical stats, including opens and clicks. Some benchmark reports put nonprofit open rates close to 28.59%, while others will lean closer to 40%. A large part of that gap traces back to Apple's Mail Privacy Protection feature, which preloads images and can register an email as "opened" even when nobody looked at it, a distortion that's been reshaping open rate reporting industrywide since 2021, with different platforms adjusting for it to different degrees. Litmus, whose research surveys marketers directly rather than pulling only from platform-side data, has been pointing the industry toward click rate and click-to-open rate as the more reliable engagement signals, precisely because raw opens are so easy to inflate. Click rate isn't immune to variance either; different platforms pull from different pools of accounts, and bot filtering methods vary across providers, so the exact number moves depending on the source. But that variance is nowhere near as dramatic as what happens with opens, which is why it's the number worth anchoring to.

If you're a nonprofit sending fundraising or donor communications, a click rate above 3 percent is a reasonable, achievable target based on current platform data. If open rate is something you need to keep an eye on too, shoot for landing somewhere between 28 and 40 percent, depending on which source and methodology you're looking at, but treat it as directional context, not a hard number to chase, for the reasons above. If you're a B2B organization, business and finance's 2.78% click rate is the closest published baseline, though a well-segmented nurture sequence to warm, sales-adjacent leads should be able to beat it.

Benchmarks Are a Starting Point, Not the Whole Picture

For our clients, industry benchmarks are a great starting point for gauging the health of a list and the viability of new subscriber sources. If your newly launched website is attracting plenty of attention, but the subscribers coming from it measure far below the industry averages, that's worth investigating. Ask if it's your site, its content, and where you're promoting it are actually reaching the audience that's going to respond to what you send, or if your content needs adjustment.

Remember that email marketing builds brand awareness and relationships, not just click-throughs, which is exactly why clicks alone shouldn't be the finish line either. Replies and forwards tell you a lot about how your messaging is landing with your audience, more than a click ever will. A low attrition rate is a meaningful sign of list health on its own. What doesn't hold up in 2026 is the old idea that simply sitting in someone's inbox without ever being opened is doing you any favors. Sustained non-engagement is a deliverability risk now, not a neutral outcome, so consistency only helps you if people are actually opening and acting on what you send.

What Email Marketing Experts Say About Using Industry Benchmarks

I'm a Mailchimp Pro Partner myself, and I've built real relationships with other partners around the world over the years, several of whom work across multiple platforms beyond Mailchimp. I asked these peers for their thoughts on this topic, as I respect their work and their opinions on these benchmarks carry real weight. Their perspectives come from working in the accounts they manage every day, not just a survey of strangers.

Global, cross-industry averages are a reasonable floor, but they rarely map cleanly onto a specific market or vertical. Alessandra Farabegoli, Digital Strategist and Co-Founder of Palabra and Freelancecamp Italia, works almost entirely with Italian clients and pulls her comparison data from Italian market reports rather than global ones, for exactly this reason. As she puts it:

"As I mostly work on Italian projects, I have to find Italian statistics to evaluate open and click rates, so I use the annual reports released by mailing platforms that are based in Italy and mostly work on the Italian market. Anyway, as I always say to my clients, if your industry average open rate is 16% and you make 20%, this is far from satisfactory, because you still waste 80% of your effort in sending emails that nobody cares about: so you'd better work hard to clean your list, raise the quality of your content, align with your audience expectations (or look for the right audience for your content), segment your list in order to write only to the people who may be interested, find the right time to write, define your tone of voice, focus on your goal and find the KPIs that are really tied to your goals (eg. revenue generated versus vanity metrics)."

Glenn Edley, Director and Email Strategist at Spike in New Zealand, runs into a version of the same problem. Global stats aren't built with his market in mind, though he still treats them as a rough baseline worth checking against. In his words:

"Working in New Zealand, it's hard to rely on global stats as they don't tend to be applicable. However, they give us a good basis to work from, and we find our response rates are generally a lot higher — smaller lists help. If they're not, then we will dig into the data, find out why not, and get them back on track."

Between them, Alessandra and Glenn make the same point I made above about source variance, just from a different angle. A benchmark is only as useful as how closely it matches the audience actually sitting on your list. A U.S. cross-industry average, an Italian market report, and a New Zealand small-list baseline are all "correct" for the account measuring against them, and none of them are interchangeable.

How much weight a benchmark deserves also depends on where a program actually is in its life. A brand new list has no history of its own to measure against, so an external number is genuinely useful groundwork. Emily Ryan, Co-Founder and Email Strategist at Westfield Creative, uses industry benchmarks this way, as real input, not just a nod to convention. I've known Emily for years, and she's built a real niche specifically inside the Mailchimp ecosystem, which gives her opinion particular weight for anyone benchmarking a Mailchimp account. In her words:

"Industry benchmarks are important for reporting to your clients. We often include the industry averages so that our clients can see that their campaigns are (hopefully) performing well above others in their industry. We also benchmark success if few people unsubscribed, if people shared or forwarded the email, and of course, by how much revenue came in from that particular email."

Once a program has enough of its own history, the internal trend line tends to matter more than the external comparison. Doug Dennison, former CEO and Co-founder of MailNinja, builds his approach almost entirely around a client's own account data and a defined goal per campaign, rather than an industry number:

"We don't tend to pay much attention to industry benchmarks, as every client is unique; instead, we audit the customer's ESP account, and focus more on their own average rates, and incrementally look to improve these over time. We also set goals for campaigns, so there's a single aim for the campaign, such as increased open rates or sales."

Adam Q. Holden-Bache, Director of Email Marketing at Enventys Partners, works primarily with startups, and his opinion on this lines up closely with what I see in my own accounts. He takes the internal-data approach a step further and skips the industry comparison almost entirely:

"We don't compare against industry benchmarks because they don't matter. Other brands have different products, different subscribers, different offers, different everything. So why compare against that? The only thing that matters is if our marketing is generating positive business results. So we identify our KPIs and establish benchmarks then constantly work to improve those."

Emily, Doug, and Adam aren't really disagreeing with each other. They're describing two different stages of the same program. Early on, when there's no internal baseline yet, an external benchmark is one of the only honest reference points available, which is why Emily builds it into client reporting alongside unsubscribes, forwards, and revenue. Once a program has enough runway to trust its own numbers, that external comparison naturally matters less, and Doug and Adam's approach, measure against your own account, set your own goals, judge success by results, takes over.

The Bottom Line on Email Marketing Benchmarks

So what should you think or do about the numbers at the top of this piece? They're a start but not the finish line for your planning, and both depend on which market, which vertical, and which stage of program you're measuring. If you're a nonprofit or B2B organization just getting a list off the ground, the Mailchimp benchmarks above are a solid place to start, with a caveat that other sources will hand you different figures depending on methodology and audience. If you've been running a program for a while, your own account's trend, opens, clicks, unsubscribes, forwards, and revenue together will tell you more than any published average ever could. That's true for Doug, Adam, Alessandra, and Glenn in their own markets, and it's true for you.

Twenty-five years of building nonprofit, B2B, and higher ed programs have taught me the same thing every time: the number worth chasing isn't the industry average. It's your own list, outperforming itself, quarter over quarter. And even that isn't the finish line. Clicks tell you people are paying attention. Whether they're actually engaged with your organization, in ways that don't show up in a single benchmark report, is a bigger question than this article can answer. But it's the one worth asking once your click rate is where it needs to be.

If you want a second opinion on where your own numbers actually stand, that's exactly what our email audit is built for: a clear-eyed look at your account against the benchmarks that genuinely apply to you, not a generic average. Or if you'd rather talk it through first, schedule a discovery call and we'll help you figure out where to start.