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 Q3 2026, Omeda delivered nearly 1.96 billion emails on behalf of clients, with deliverability holding at 99%. After a quarter of softer engagement, the story turned: open rates recovered to their strongest level of the year, click performance stabilized, and complaint rate improved sharply. Volume stayed high and steady.
Overall email performance for Q3 2026:
- Delivery rate: 99.05%
- Total open rate: 45.39%
- Unique open rate: 31.52%
- Total click rate: 1.52%
- Unique click rate: 1.03%
- Total clicks / total opens (Total CTOR): 3.36%
- Unique clicks / unique opens (Unique CTOR): 3.27%
- Unsubscribe rate: 0.11%
- Complaint rate: 0.0021%
👀 Want to see how your numbers stack up? Use our email benchmark calculator.
Two positives stood out. Opens rebounded quarter over quarter, recovering most of the ground lost in Q2 — unique open rate is now above where it sat in Q1. And audience health is markedly stronger than a year ago, with unsubscribe and complaint rates both down sharply year over year. Clicks steadied quarter over quarter after several quarters of decline, though they remain well below last year. Newsletters again did the heavy lifting, at roughly 53% of delivered volume and by far the strongest engagement of any category.
Click bot activity continued to climb: across the Q3-aligned weekly dataset, 90.1% of all recorded click activity was identified as bot-driven, up from 88.9% in Q2 — one more reason to read the click stabilization above as a directional signal rather than a precise measure (see the Bot Clicks & Signal Quality deep dive below).
Note: Figures in this report are built from client-level data across the media and publishing organizations on the platform.
Email Engagement Metrics for Q3 2026
Omeda Email Engagement Report · Q3 2026
Email Engagement Metrics for Q3 2026
| Email Deployment Type | Delivery Rate | Total Open Rate | Unique Open Rate | Total Click Rate | Unique Click Rate | Total CTOR | Unique CTOR | Unsubscribe Rate | Complaint Rate |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Newsletters | 99.19% | 48.50% | 33.03% | 2.34% | 1.51% | 4.82% | 4.58% | 0.087% | 0.0018% |
| Events | 98.75% | 40.68% | 29.11% | 0.57% | 0.46% | 1.41% | 1.59% | 0.126% | 0.0018% |
| Marketing / Promos | 98.94% | 41.90% | 29.86% | 0.58% | 0.46% | 1.39% | 1.54% | 0.124% | 0.0027% |
| Misc Comms | 99.22% | 53.79% | 37.64% | 0.82% | 0.61% | 1.52% | 1.62% | 0.202% | 0.0026% |
| Digital Magazine | 98.70% | 40.60% | 27.00% | 1.51% | 1.11% | 3.71% | 4.10% | 0.192% | 0.0037% |
| Surveys & Research | 98.98% | 41.48% | 30.10% | 0.91% | 0.76% | 2.20% | 2.52% | 0.176% | 0.0044% |
| Overall Metrics | 99.05% | 45.39% | 31.52% | 1.52% | 1.03% | 3.36% | 3.27% | 0.108% | 0.0021% |
Source: Aggregated Omeda Client Data on File.
Newsletters
Includes only emails designated as newsletters.
Events
Includes events, live conferences, virtual conferences, and webinars.
Marketing/Promos
Includes advertiser promotion, audience promotion, marketing, third-party, and white papers.
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.
Surveys & Research
Includes reader service, research, and surveys.
Percentages reflect share of total delivered volume, which also includes a smaller “Other Communications” category (~1.6%) not shown as its own benchmark row.
Comparisons
Delivered volume: 1.96B in Q3 2026 vs. 1.96B in Q2 2026 (0.0% QoQ); vs. 1.96B in Q3 2025 (0.0% YoY). Volume has been remarkably steady year over year.
Omeda Email Engagement Report · Q3 2026
At a glance: Q3 2026 vs. last quarter and last year
| Metric | Q3 2025 | Q2 2026 | Q3 2026 | QoQ | YoY |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Delivered volume | 1.96B | 1.96B | 1.96B | 0.0% | 0.0% |
| Delivery rate | 98.98% | 98.95% | 99.05% | ▲0.1 pt | ▲0.1 pt |
| Total open rate | 49.21% | 44.52% | 45.39% | ▲2.0% | ▼7.8% |
| Unique open rate | 33.80% | 30.37% | 31.52% | ▲3.8% | ▼6.7% |
| Total click rate | 2.20% | 1.55% | 1.52% | ▼1.7% | ▼30.7% |
| Unique click rate | 1.42% | 1.04% | 1.03% | ▼0.8% | ▼27.6% |
| Total CTOR | 4.47% | 3.48% | 3.36% | ▼3.4% | ▼24.8% |
| Unique CTOR | 4.21% | 3.42% | 3.27% | ▼4.4% | ▼22.3% |
| Unsubscribe rate | 0.146% | 0.105% | 0.108% | ▲2.7% | ▼26.3% |
| Complaint rate | 0.0033% | 0.0025% | 0.0021% | ▼14.1% | ▼35.9% |
Green indicates a favorable movement and red an unfavorable one — so a falling unsubscribe or complaint rate reads as green. Delivered-volume and delivery-rate changes are shown neutral.
Omeda Email Engagement Report · Q3 2026
Email Metrics — Year over Year
Each metric uses its own scale. Source: Aggregated Omeda Client Data on File.
Trends & Analysis
Opens recovered to the strongest level of the year
This is the quarter's headline. Unique open rate rose from 30.37% in Q2 to 31.52% in Q3, a 3.8% increase — and it now sits above Q1 2026's 31.17%, the strongest reading of the year so far. Total open rate climbed similarly, from 44.52% to 45.39%.
Put simply, Q3 2026 generated about 12 more unique opens per 1,000 delivered than Q2. The slide we tracked through Q1 and into early Q2 has fully reversed: within Q3, unique open rate held steady month to month (31.7% in July, 31.8% in August, 31.0% in September), suggesting the recovery is a stable new level rather than a one-month bounce.
Year over year, opens remain modestly below where they were: unique open rate was 31.52% in Q3 2026 versus 33.80% in Q3 2025, a 6.7% decrease. So while Q3 recovered strongly against Q2, it hasn't fully closed the gap to last year — the recovery is real, but it's a return toward, not past, 2025 levels.
Click performance stabilized
After several quarters of decline, clicks leveled off. Unique click rate was essentially flat quarter over quarter — 1.03% in Q3 versus 1.04% in Q2 — at about 10.3 unique clicks per 1,000 delivered.
Unique CTOR did slip, from 3.42% to 3.27% (a 4.4% decrease), but that movement is mostly arithmetic rather than behavioral: because opens rose while clicks held flat, the ratio of clicks to opens compressed. The more useful read is that the raw click signal stopped falling.
Against last year, though, clicks are still well down: unique click rate fell from 1.42% in Q3 2025 to 1.03% in Q3 2026 (a 27.6% decrease), and unique CTOR from 4.21% to 3.27% (a 22.3% decrease). That large year-over-year drop should be read in light of signal quality, not just behavior: bot-labeled clicks reached 90.1% of all recorded click activity this quarter, up from 88.9% a year-earlier quarter's trajectory, and better bot filtering strips more automated activity out of reported totals. Combined with the industry shift toward newsletters designed to be read inside the inbox, the same delivered volume now produces fewer — but cleaner — reported clicks. The quarter-over-quarter stabilization suggests that downward pressure may finally be leveling off.
Volume held high and steady
Delivered volume was 1.95B, down just 0.7% from Q2's 1.96B — effectively flat, and still well above Q1's 1.77B. After Q2's rebound, Q3 consolidated that higher base rather than giving it back.
List health is much stronger than a year ago
The clearest good news in the quarter is the year-over-year improvement in audience health. Unsubscribe rate was 0.108% in Q3 2026 versus 0.146% in Q3 2025 — a 26% improvement — and complaint rate improved 36% YoY (0.0033% to 0.0021%). Audiences are both less likely to opt out and far less likely to complain than they were a year ago.
Quarter over quarter the picture is more mixed but still largely positive. Complaint rate improved again, from 0.0025% in Q2 to 0.0021% in Q3 (a 14% decrease, about 2.1 complaints per 100,000 delivered). Unsubscribe rate edged up slightly, from 0.105% to 0.108% (a 2.7% increase, roughly 1.08 unsubscribes per 1,000) — but that uptick was front-loaded: September posted the quarter's lowest unsubscribe rate (about 1.01 per 1,000) and the strongest month of the half, so the small QoQ rise eased as the quarter went on and sits well inside the year's improved range.
Note: A decrease in complaint rate can also indicate increased spam-folder placement. Keep an eye on your engagement rate to confirm it's stable and not trending down — here, rising opens are a reassuring sign.
Deep Dive: What Changed in the Mix
Q3's send mix was calmer than Q2's. The big promotional surge that defined Q2 partly unwound: Promo/Marketing volume eased about 5% quarter over quarter, while Events grew about 5% and Newsletters held roughly flat. Net effect, newsletters ticked up to 52.7% of delivered volume, their highest share of the year.
Omeda Email Engagement Report · Q3 2026
What Changed in the Mix
Change in delivered volume by email type, Q2 → Q3 2026. Promotional sends eased while newsletters and events grew.
Newsletters remained the majority of volume (52.7%) and gained share this quarter. Source: Aggregated Omeda Client Data on File.
That matters for reading the quarter's rates. Part of Q2's blended softening came from a shift toward lower-engagement promotional sends; in Q3, that shift partially reversed, which helps explain why blended opens improved even as individual categories were broadly stable. When the mix tilts back toward newsletters, the blended average rises with it.
As always, compare within the same email type over time rather than across formats, and account for shifts in your own send mix before concluding that engagement is up or down.
Deep Dive: Bot Clicks & Signal Quality
Click bot activity remained the single biggest factor in how click data should be read — and it ticked up again. In the Q3-aligned weekly dataset, 90.1% of all recorded click activity was labeled as bot-driven, continuing a steady climb: 87.3% in Q1, 88.9% in Q2, 90.1% in Q3.
Omeda Email Engagement Report · Q3 2026 · Signal Quality
Bots vs. Humans: Q3 2026 Click Activity
90.1% of all recorded click activity was bot-driven — and it ticked up again this quarter.
Only about 1 in 10 recorded clicks came from a real person. Based on the Q3-aligned weekly bot-labeled dataset (Jul 5–Sep 27, 2026). Source: Aggregated Omeda Client Data on File.
As in prior quarters, the more important point isn't that bot activity is high — it's that it varies sharply by email type, which means raw click rates are far more trustworthy in some parts of the mix than others.
The highest bot shares appeared in:
- Live Conferences: 98.0%
- Events: 96.3%
- Webinar: 96.1%
- Audience Promotion: 96.0%
- Advertiser Promotion: 95.8%
The lowest bot shares (among meaningful-volume categories) appeared in:
- Newsletter: 85.9%
- Digital Magazine: 91.1%
These figures don't mean event or gated-content emails are poor performers. They mean those formats attract much heavier automated click interference, so their raw click totals are especially misleading.
Omeda Email Engagement Report · Q3 2026 · Signal Quality
Bot vs. Human Clicks by Email Type
Share of recorded click activity, Q3 2026. Bot share varies sharply by deployment type — so raw clicks are far more trustworthy for some formats than others.
Newsletters had the lowest bot share — and carry the most human clicks by far (about 146M of the 302M recorded clicks). Based on the Q3-aligned weekly bot-labeled dataset. Source: Aggregated Omeda Client Data on File.
Why newsletters matter more than raw click volume suggests
Newsletters again stood out as the strongest source of genuine human click activity:
- 56.3% of all recorded click activity came from newsletters
- 80.5% of all human clicks came from newsletters
- Newsletters had the lowest bot share of any high-volume category
While raw click totals are noisy across the board, newsletters remain the most reliable place to look for real audience engagement — and that reliability edged up this quarter, with newsletters' share of human clicks rising from 79.0% in Q2 to 80.5% in Q3.
What Advanced Bot Click Suppression reveals
Omeda's Advanced Bot Click Suppression adds a layer of bot filtering on top of the baseline filtering every client receives, and the Q3 data again shows what that extra layer surfaces.
Clients with the feature enabled show a higher share of clicks flagged as bots, not lower — 93.4% for enabled clients versus 81.1% for those without it. The gap holds within email types too: within newsletters, bot share was 75.2% for clients with suppression off versus 90.3% for clients with it on; the same pattern appears in Marketing (84.1% → 97.9%), Third Party (90.7% → 97.5%), and Events (92.8% → 97.3%).
The reason is the same as last quarter: the feature catches and negates additional bot clicks that would otherwise be counted as real. Clients without it aren't seeing fewer bots — they're seeing undetected bots quietly inflate their reported click numbers. Advanced Bot Click Suppression brings those clicks into view and removes them, leaving a cleaner, more honest human-click figure.
This is a measurement-quality benefit, not a change in bot behavior itself. Turning it on may make reported click totals look lower, but those lower numbers are closer to the truth. (Because clients choose whether to enable the feature, these comparisons reflect what the feature surfaces rather than a controlled experiment — but the consistency of the pattern across formats, and across quarters, is telling.)
Newsletter Benchmarks: B2B vs. B2C
Newsletters are the platform's strongest engagement driver, but the all-client average hides a wide split between B2B and B2C media publishers. Breaking Q3 2026 newsletters out by audience type gives clients a benchmark against the segment they actually compete in.
Omeda Email Engagement Report · Q3 2026
Newsletter Benchmarks: B2B vs. B2C
Unique newsletter engagement by audience type, Q3 2026.
| Segment | Unique Open Rate | Unique Click Rate | Unique CTOR | Unsub / 1,000 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| All newsletters | 33.0% | 1.51% | 4.58% | 0.87 |
| B2B | 32.3% | 1.28% | 3.96% | 0.80 |
| B2C | 38.0% | 3.08% | 8.12% | 1.36 |
B2C newsletters engaged about 2.4× the click rate and 2.0× the click-to-open rate of B2B — with a higher unsubscribe rate to match. Source: Aggregated Omeda Client Data on File.
B2C newsletters continued to engage far more than B2B — roughly 2.4x the click rate and 2.0x the click-to-open rate, on a higher open rate (38.0% vs. 32.3%). That split was stable versus Q2: the CTOR gap widened slightly (from 1.98x to 2.05x) while the click-rate gap eased a touch (from 2.47x to 2.41x). The pattern is durable, not a one-quarter artifact.
The same counterweight from Q2 still applies: B2C's stronger engagement comes with higher churn. B2C unsubscribe rate ran about 1.7x B2B's (1.36 vs. 0.80 per 1,000 delivered). B2C audiences click more freely and opt out more freely — engagement lift and list volatility travel together in that segment.
The practical takeaway: if you're a B2B publisher, a ~4% newsletter CTOR is on-benchmark, not underperforming, even though the all-newsletter blend sits higher. If you're B2C, aim for engagement closer to double that, while watching unsubscribe rate more carefully.
Strategic Recommendations
1) Read the recovery as a new baseline, not a bounce. Opens didn't just tick up — they held steady across all three months of Q3, above Q1 levels. Treat ~31.5% unique open as the current benchmark and watch whether it holds into Q4.
2) Account for your send mix before judging engagement. Blended rates move with the mix. Q3's improvement was partly a tilt back toward newsletters; a tilt toward promotional sends would pull the blend down even if each format is steady. Compare within the same email type over time.
3) Keep leaning on newsletter engagement. Newsletters were ~53% of delivered volume and remain the strongest engagement driver by a wide margin — the clearest indicator of real audience interest.
4) Protect the complaint-rate gain, and keep an eye on unsubscribes. Complaint rate improved meaningfully; unsubscribe rate edged up before easing in September. As you test cadence, targeting, and creative, preserve the complaint progress and confirm the unsubscribe uptick doesn't resume.
5) Benchmark against your own segment. B2B and B2C newsletters engage very differently (B2C runs ~2x on clicks and CTOR). Judge your newsletter performance against the right peer set — and if you're B2C, pair that higher engagement with closer attention to unsubscribe rate.
6) Interpret clicks in context. With bot share now at 90.1% of recorded clicks and still climbing, raw clicks are a directional signal, not a complete measure of intent — and click quality varies enormously by format. Compare within the same email type, lean hardest on newsletter engagement, and treat Advanced Bot Click Suppression as a data-quality upgrade: lower reported clicks, but a more honest view.
Key Metrics by Email Type
Omeda Email Engagement Report
Key Metrics by Email Type
Quarterly, Q1 2025 – Q3 2026. Each metric uses its own scale. Unique CTOR = unique clicks ÷ unique opens. Source: Aggregated Omeda Client Data on File.
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