Each quarter, Omeda’s Email Engagement Report aggregates performance data across media and publishing organizations using our platform. It provides a high-level view of how your email program stacks up against others in the industry.
In Q1 2026, Omeda delivered over 1.77B emails on behalf of clients with strong delivery (99%). Open performance weakened from last quarter and year over year, while click-through held nearly flat quarter over quarter but declined sharply year over year.
Overall email performance for Q1 2026:
- Delivery rate: 99.04%
- Total open rate: 46.00%
- Unique open rate: 31.17%
- Total click rate: 1.63%
- Unique click rate: 1.08%
- Total clicks/total opens (Total CTOR): 3.55%
- Unique clicks/unique opens (Unique CTOR): 3.47%
- Unsubscribe rate: 0.13%
- Complaint rate: 0.0031%
👀 Want to see how your numbers stack up? Use our email benchmark calculator.
The quarter’s strongest positive signal was list health. Unsubscribe rate improved versus Q4 2025, and complaint rate improved versus both Q4 2025 and Q1 2025. The clearest pressure point was click conversion versus last year: both total CTOR and unique CTOR declined materially year over year. This points to a trend the industry is seeing around emails (particularly newsletters) being designed to engage within the email, generating fewer clicks.
Newsletters remained the dominant reach driver. We noticed an increase in emails designated as Audience Promotion, Webinar, Events, Whitepapers, and Virtual Conferences being sent this quarter.
Click bot activity continues to dominate raw click data. Across all emails sent in Q1, 87.3% of recorded clicks were identified as bot-driven.
Email Engagement Metrics for Q1 2026
Events
Includes events, live conferences, virtual conferences, and webinars.
Surveys & Research
Includes reader service, research, and surveys.
Newsletters
Includes only emails designated as newsletters.
Digital Magazines
Includes only digital magazines. Note that in earlier reports this metric was grouped with Newsletters. We are now separating that data in these reports.
Promo/Marketing
Includes advertiser promotion, audience promotion, marketing, third-party, and white papers.
Comparisons
Delivered volume: 1.77B Q1 2026 vs. 1.93B in Q4 2025 (-11.86%)
Trends & Analysis
Overall open performance weakened
In Q1 2026, open performance softened both quarter over quarter and year over year.
Total open rate declined from 48.09% in Q4 2025 to 45.95% in Q1 2026, a 4.4% decrease. Unique open rate declined from 32.91% to 31.17%, a 5.3% decrease. Compared with Q1 2025, unique open rate was down from 32.64%, a 4.5% decrease.
Put simply, Q1 2026 generated about:
- 21 fewer total opens QoQ per 1,000 delivered than Q4 2025
- 17 fewer unique opens QoQ per 1,000 delivered than Q4 2025
- 29 fewer total opens YoY per 1,000 delivered than Q1 2025
- 15 fewer unique opens YoY per 1,000 delivered than Q1 2025
The reported decline in overall opens could reflect a few factors working together: audience fatigue, inbox placement pressure, weaker subject-line performance, or a shift in more sends from email categories that naturally draw lower open rates. (More on this last point later in our email mix analysis.)
Click performance was stable versus last quarter, but much weaker than last year
Compared QoQ with Q4 2025, click-through performance was mostly steady. Unique CTR was 1.08% in both quarters, essentially flat, while unique CTOR improved from 3.30% to 3.47%, a 5.1% increase.
Compared YoY with Q1 2025, the picture was weaker: unique CTR declined from 1.76% to 1.08%, a 38.5% decrease, and unique CTOR declined from 5.40% to 3.47%, a 35.7% decrease.
On a per-1,000-delivered basis:
- Total clicks were 16.3 in Q1 2026 versus 16.7 in Q4 2025 and 28.6 in Q1 2025
- Unique clicks were 10.8 in Q1 2026 versus 10.9 in Q4 2025 and 17.6 in Q1 2025
That means Q1 2026 was broadly in line with Q4 2025 in terms of clicks, but well below last year where we’re seeing substantially less reported click activity for the same amount of delivered volume. This could be in part due to improved bot filtering and also email behavioral changes seen across industries where newsletters and digest emails contain more information and result in fewer clicks.
We know from previous bot analysis that raw click activity should not be treated as a clean proxy for audience intent. Some of the instability in click metrics reflects not only changing reader behavior, but also changing signal quality.
List health improved
This is one of the quarter’s clearest positives. The audience was somewhat less engaged, but also less likely to complain and slightly less likely to unsubscribe than in Q4.
Unsubscribe rate improved from 0.126% in Q4 2025 to 0.118% in Q1 2026, a 6.0% improvement. Put another way, Q1 2026 saw about 1.18 unsubscribes per 1,000 delivered emails, down from 1.26 per 1,000 in Q4 2025.
Complaint rate improved from 0.0031% in Q4 2025 to 0.0027% in Q1 2026, and from 0.0044% in Q1 2025 to 0.0027% in Q1 2026. That equals about 2.7 complaints per 100,000 delivered emails in Q1 2026, down from 3.1 per 100,000 last quarter and 4.4 per 100,000 a year ago.
Note: A decrease in complaint rate can also indicate increased spam folder placement. Ensure your engagement rate is stable and not trending down.
Deep Dive: Bot Clicks & Signal Quality
Click bot activity was a major factor in Q1 2026 click reporting. In the Q1 2026-aligned weekly dataset, 87.3% of all recorded click activity was labeled as bot-driven.
The most important takeaway is not simply that bot activity was high. It is that bot activity varied significantly by email type, which means raw click rates are more trustworthy in some parts of the email mix than others.
The highest bot share in the dataset appeared in:
- Live Conferences: 97.8%
- Events: 96.9%
- Whitepapers: 96.3%
- Research: 96.2%
- Webinar: 96.1%
Relatively lower bot shares appeared in:
- Newsletter: 82.4%
- Reader Service: 87.2%
- Digital Magazine: 88.9%
These figures do not mean event or gated-content emails are “bad” performers. They mean those email types appear to attract much heavier automated click interference, so raw click totals can be especially misleading.
Why newsletters matter more than raw click volume suggests
Newsletters stood out as the strongest source of human click activity:
- 60.1% of all click activity came from newsletters
- 83.4% of all human clicks came from newsletters
- Newsletters had the lowest bot share among the major high-volume categories
While overall click performance softened, newsletters remain the most reliable source of meaningful human engagement.
A note for Omeda clients
For Omeda clients, Advanced Click Bot Suppression can provide a more accurate view of real click activity by filtering out additional bot-driven clicks from reported engagement. This should be understood as a measurement-quality benefit, not as something that changes bot behavior itself.
Deep Dive: What Changed in the Mix
The underlying Q1 2026 data shows that Newsletters remain the largest volume driver, so changes there continue to shape overall performance more than any other category.
At the same time, the quarter was not weak across every category. Events, Webinar, Audience Promotion, Whitepapers, and Virtual Conferences designation types showed pockets of delivered-volume growth, while clients did not send as many Newsletter, Marketing, and Third Party emails.
Taken together with the click bot analysis, this makes category context even more important. Some categories may appear active based on click totals, but the quality of those clicks differs sharply by send type. That is why email-type comparisons work best when they consider both scale and signal quality.
Deep Dive: Why Domain-Level Analysis Matters
Click activity is influenced not only by the type of email sent, but also by the recipient’s email domain. As noted in our recent blog, Why Domain-Level Metrics Matter for Email Engagement, Microsoft-hosted domains tend to show higher levels of bot-driven click activity than Gmail or Yahoo.
That means two campaigns with similar content can appear to perform differently based largely on audience composition. A campaign sent to a Microsoft-heavy audience may show stronger raw click activity, while a larger share of those clicks may be automated.
For that reason, domain-level segmentation is a useful best practice when evaluating click performance. Looking at Microsoft, Gmail, and Yahoo domains separately can provide a clearer picture of real audience engagement and make click trends easier to interpret over time.
Strategic Recommendations
1) Focus first on nurturing the audience that will help you drive the highest ROI
Even modest lifts there can move total quarterly performance in a meaningful way. Learn more in our guide: Smaller Lists, Bigger Wins: How Smart Email Engagement Strategies Drive Real Results
2) Interpret clicks in context
Raw clicks should be treated as a directional signal, not a complete measure of audience intent. Performance comparisons are most useful when made within the same email type rather than across fundamentally different formats.
3) Put more weight on newsletter engagement
Because newsletters account for the majority of human clicks, newsletter engagement remains one of the clearest indicators of real audience interest. When measuring quality of engagement, newsletter trends deserve extra attention.
4) Segment reporting by email type and domain
Click distortion varies by email type and by recipient domain. Segmenting reporting this way can help separate real audience behavior from environment-driven or format-driven noise.
5) Preserve the complaint-rate improvement
Complaint rate improved meaningfully, which is worth protecting. As clients test changes to subject lines, cadence, targeting, and click-focused creative, it will be important to preserve that progress in audience health.
6) Use suppression and filtering as measurement tools
For Omeda clients, bot filtering and suppression tools should be framed as ways to improve data quality, not just as product settings. Better filtering may make reported click totals look lower, but it produces a more honest view of performance.
