Curious about how your team’s email marketing efforts compare to others in the media industry? Each quarter, Omeda releases aggregated, anonymized data from client emails sent from our platform so you can understand how your emails are performing.
In Q1 2025, Omeda clients sent 1.87 billion emails from our platform. Here are the latest email benchmarks gathered from Q1:
Average delivery rate
98.77% (-0.04% relative, -0.04% absolute from Q4 2024)
Average unique open rate
29.34% (-2.27% relative, -7.18% absolute from Q4 2024)
Average unique click rate
1.27% (-0.09% relative, -6.6% absolute from Q4 2024)
Average unique CTR
4.35% (+0.05% relative, +1.16% absolute from Q4 2024)
Average unsubscribe rate
0.15% (+0.06% relative, +66% absolute from Q4 2024)
Want to easily calculate your benchmark against our latest data?
Use the Email Benchmark Calculator
Here’s an interactive overview of key metrics by email type per quarter for 2024:
One interesting thing to note: Newsletter, Marketing, and Events & Webinar sends are looking great this quarter, with Unique Open Rates, Unique Click Rates and Unique CTRs are up across the board.
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.
Promo/Marketing
Includes advertiser promotion, audience promotion, marketing, third-party and white papers.
What’s on our minds
There’s a lot on our minds when it comes to email engagement:
- Newsletters and emails are saturating the market.
- There seems to be a lot more click bot activity. 🤖
- Google and Yahoo are enforcing stricter requirements, penalizing senders that exceed their reported spam threshold (0.3%).
- Inbox Service Providers (ISPs) are purging their inactive accounts more aggressively.
- More email is getting diverted into secondary folders based on AI and reader behavior.
- We’re all waiting to really understand how Apple Intelligence is going to affect email engagement.
Luckily, our experts’ sage advice here at Omeda has been pretty consistent: Stick to best practices. If you’ve already been using best practices, keep at it. If you haven’t been, there’s never been a better time to start.
Read our blog: Email deliverability best practices
Additional advice from our experts:
- Embrace the Gmail tabs; emails are being organized as intended.
- Monitor overall engagement metrics (in addition to opens).
This quarter, we thought we’d focus on click bot activity data.
Click bot activity data
Omeda has been keeping a close eye on click bot activity over the past year. Here’s what we’ve noticed:
- Across all clients, monthly click bot trends continue to fluctuate month-to-month, but the trend is increasing.
- Click bot activity started a sharper increase in September 2024, peaking in October with 70% opens, and then decreased again to 61% in November.
- Newsletters have the lowest click bot activity (~71%). They’re sent on a predictable schedule, which makes a big difference.
- Audience promo deployments have the highest click bot activity (~91%).
Key takeaway
Our advice: If you’re seeing inflated metrics due to click bot activity, keep calm and carry on. These clicks aren’t designed to ruin our day, but to protect people. Shift your attention back to the humans.
Focus on executing best practices and sending valuable and relevant content to your audience. Build trust and a stronger connection by using smart personalization and serve content you know they’re interested in based on your behavioral data.
Re-engaging inactive subscribers
In our Q4 2024 report, we asked what you want to dive deeper into in 2025. Your answer was clear: 44% of you said “Re-engaging inactive subscribers.”
Check out our recent blog, 5 Proven Ways to Re-Engage Inactive Subscribers (That Media Brands Swear By). We’ll focus on creating more content about how to re-engage subscribers. Stay tuned!
View all the email engagement data
Interested in diving deeper into all the data? Here’s more information about Q1 2025 email engagement by the numbers.
- # of email deployments: 1,866,186,847, -6.9% from Q4 2024
- Delivery rate: 98.77% (-0.04%)
- Total open rate: 43.00% (-9.6%)
- Unique open rate: 29.34% (-7.18%)
- Total click rate: 1.8% (-20%)
- Unique click rate: 1.27% (-6.62%)
- Total CTR: 4.17% (-11.65%)
- Unique CTR: 4.35% (+1.16%)
- Unsubscribe rate: 0.146% (+62%)
- Complaint rate: 0.0055% (+17%)
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 Q1 email metrics year-over-year 2023-2025:
Sources:
Omeda aggregated client email data on file.