Acoustic has released its 2025 Marketing Benchmark Report, analyzing anonymized email marketing data from over 150 billion messages sent by organizations across 14 industries. The report offers a broad view into current performance trends, giving marketers and email service providers concrete benchmarks to evaluate their efforts.
Key takeaways from the data:
- Email holds steady as a high-performing channel, with a global average open rate of 25.7%, nearly unchanged from 2024.
- Click-through rates (CTR) averaged 1.4%, while click-to-open rates (CTOR) came in at 5.5%, indicating moderate engagement across sectors.
- Bounce rates remained low (0.4%), while opt-out rates also held steady at 0.1% — suggesting recipients continue to prefer ignoring unwanted messages over actively unsubscribing.
- Government, Education, and Nonprofit sectors showed the strongest engagement, with open rates over 30% and CTORs nearing 7%, likely driven by informational relevance and trust.
- Retail and Consumer Services, by contrast, showed lower engagement, despite higher send volumes.
The report highlights small but important regional variations: North America led with higher open and click rates, while EMEA and APAC regions showed slightly more conservative engagement metrics. These trends could reflect differences in consent culture, send timing strategies, or audience preferences.
For email professionals — especially those working on strategy, compliance, and deliverability — the continued stability of email KPIs signals that despite evolving regulations, privacy changes, and consumer fatigue, email marketing remains resilient when used effectively.
It also reinforces the importance of audience-specific benchmarking. Comparing your campaign to an industry average can be misleading if your vertical or region operates differently. Reports like this help provide a more precise yardstick.
The full Acoustic report is available for download here.
