Curious about how your team’s email marketing efforts compare to others in the media industry? Each quarter, we update anonymized data from our media and publishing clients so you can understand how your emails are performing.
In 2024, Omeda clients sent 7.6 billion emails from our platform. Now that the Q4 numbers are in, we’re excited to share 2024 trends and insights. First, here are the latest email benchmarks gathered from nearly 2 billion emails sent in Q4:
Average delivery rate
98.81% (-0.11% relative, -0.01% absolute from Q3)
Average unique open rate
31.61% (+3.69% relative, +1.56% absolute from Q3)
Average click rate
2.25% (+3.2% relative, 0.07% absolute from Q3)
Average unsubscribe rate
0.09% (unchanged)
Want to easily calculate your benchmark against our latest data?
Use the Email Benchmark Calculator
There’s good news in Q4. Even with ~50 million more emails sent this quarter over last quarter, the overall average open rates and click rates are up. But there is a question on nearly everyone’s mind — is it the bots? Bot clicks from data centers continue to be an industry wide issue and we’ve noticed an influx of client questions coming up this quarter. After digging through the data, it’s possible that bots played a small role, but overall, they aren’t making a big enough difference to impact the use of these benchmarks. Email security products will constantly change their algorithms to protect recipients and email vendors will continue to support clients on best practices to ensure the emails get to the inbox and the data is reliable.
Omeda will be sharing more on the topic of data center IPs and best practices on how to avoid them from impacting your email data. Subscribe to our newsletter so you don’t miss it.
Here’s an interactive overview of key metrics by email type per quarter for 2024:
Email type breakdown
Events
Includes events, live conferences, virtual conferences and webinars.
Surveys & Research
Includes reader service, research and surveys.
Newsletters
Includes digital magazines and newsletters. Later in this report, we separate digital magazine data from newsletters in our newsletter deep dive into numbers.
Promo/Marketing
Includes advertiser promotion, audience promotion, marketing, third-party and white papers.
Overall email benchmarks for media and publishing
It’s interesting to compare our client data to what other email marketing platforms are seeing. Here’s how Omeda clients stack up against other reported email benchmarks for the media and publishing industry.
It can be frustrating to find a benchmark that truly fits your needs when vendors lump the data together inconsistently. The media industry gets defined a little differently across vendors. Some throw entertainment and event marketing companies in with media, others separate that out. Many vendors don’t even provide a good benchmark for media or publishers at all. Mailchimp puts media and publishing together. MailerLite separates media from publishing. Both Mailchimp and MailerLite serve a lot of B2C media clients, which affects the aggregated data and isn’t quite as helpful for B2B media marketers trying to find a good benchmark. Omeda clients are primarily B2B, but we’ve been gaining more B2C clients in the past few years since first-party data and personalization are driving them to find more powerful solutions. We plan on separating B2B from B2C data in the future to help provide the best benchmarks possible.
For now, let’s put this data together to provide a good benchmark you can use for your media and publishing emails:
Media and publishing email benchmarks across vendors
Note that we’re comparing Avg. Click Rate here and not Click-Through Rate. That’s because the other vendors reported Click Rate only.
Key takeaways
You’ll see that Omeda client’s average unique open rate this quarter is over 31%. Based on the industry averages, if you’re seeing an average open rate of 35%, you’re doing great.
No matter what your average open rate is, the name of the game is continuous improvement. To improve your emails for your audience over time, take this week’s open rate and compare it to last week’s. Set up an experiment using the same audience and only change one other variable. It may take some time, but you’ll discover a pattern and what is unique about your audience. That’s when the magic happens — truly understanding your audience. Reading one hundred email benchmark reports will tell you never to send your emails on Saturday. But what if your niche audience is different? You just won’t know what day works best until you run the experiment for your audience.
(By the way, don’t start with Saturday. Benchmark data gives you a good starting point for your experiments and the data says don’t start with Saturday.)
Our point of view is that the real solution to email engagement is to double-down on understanding your audience, collecting first-party data, and using it to deliver better audience experiences.
Newsletter email benchmarks
For our clients, newsletters are their bread and butter. Omeda clients send 4 times as many newsletters as any other type of email — and they are the best-performing type of email.
In our consolidated reporting, we typically lump Digital Magazines and Newsletters together. But given the importance of newsletters, let’s pull out the newsletter data separately to take a closer look and compare it to what other vendors are reporting.
You’ll notice benchmarks between Beehiiv media industry clients and Omeda clients are wildly different in open and unsubscribe rates:
Of course, email deliverability, offering, target audience, and current market trends can all affect your open rate. The most interesting data to look at when it comes to opens is the almighty subject line.
Newsletter subject line length data
Omeda clients sent over 3.7 million newsletter emails in 2024. The average subject line length of those emails: 129 characters
Let’s take a deeper look at the effect that subject line length has on open rates.
Much to the sadness of email marketing newsletter writers everywhere, on the surface, it seems that it’s true that overall, longer subject lines result in a lower open rate. Except super long subject lines? What?
Let’s dig a bit deeper.
Here are the top open rates by newsletter subject line character count:
Really short and punchy or really long and descriptive. What this tells us: Start your experiments at the extremes. (On a side note, our first reaction on looking at this data: What are these super short subject lines? And maybe that’s exactly why they work…)
Since the average subject line in 2024 was 129 characters, our clients could see a big improvement by doing some experiments that involve either shortening up their subject line or working on making it more specific and helpful to get those opens.
Optimizing subject line length is only the first step to success. Here a few other best practices and resources:
- If you’re going long, keep the most important information in the first 30 characters of your subject line. What good is a catchy subject line if your audience’s mobile browser cuts it off halfway through? Mobile inboxes display only the first 33-43 characters of a subject line, so get to the point in the first 30 characters. Read 8 tips to write subject lines that get opened (+ examples)
- Use the preheader text to enhance your message.
Struggling to cut your subject line down? Use the preheader text to give readers more context — and elicit more interest in your content. - Experiment with different email subject lines and lengths. Running A/B tests on your subject lines allows you to test multiple options at once, then change your campaigns to meet audience preferences in real time. (Omeda clients can supercharge their A/B tests by running up to five tests in one campaign.)
More reading: Essential elements of an effective email newsletter
What do you want to know?
In our Q3 2024 report, we gave the following advice: Turn readers into collaborators with user-generated content. In the spirit of taking our own advice, we want to hear from you. What questions do you have? We’ve got a lot of aggregated data and insights to share. What do you want to dive deeper into in 2025?
View all the email engagement data
Interesting in diving deeper into all the data? Here’s more information about Q4 2024 email engagement by the numbers.
- # of email deployments: 1,998,872,180 (+3.8%)
- Delivery rate: 98.81% (-0.11%)
- Total open rate: 47.58% (+8.38%)
- Unique open rate: 31.61% (+4.84%)
- Total click rate: 2.25% (+3.21%)
- Unique click rate: 1.36% (+7.09%)
- Total CTR: 4.72% (-4.84%)
- Unique CTR: 4.30% (+1.9%)
- Unsubscribe rate: 0.090% (-1.10%)
- Complaint rate: 0.0047% (-6.00%)
Relative change between quarters is shown in the parenthesis. We use the percent change equation to find the relative change between rates.
Compare different email types side-by-side with an interactive email metrics comparison:
Here’s an interactive overview of the combined email metrics per quarter for 2023-2024:
Sources:
Email Marketing Benchmarks and Metrics Businesses Should Track. MailChimp.com. Media & Publishing Average Totals accessed January 28, 2025.
Duncan Elder. (2025, January 13) Email marketing benchmarks by industry and region for 2025. MailerLite.com. Media & Publishing data accessed January 28, 2025.
State of Newsletters. Beehiiv.com. (2025, January 27). Core engagement statistics for media industry accessed January 28, 2025.
Omeda aggregated client email data on file.