Selzy, an email marketing platform for small businesses, has released a new Email Marketing Benchmarks 2026 report analyzing 388,431 campaigns and 602.2 million emails to identify what actually affects email engagement, deliverability, and unsubscribes.
The study found major differences in performance depending on audience size, campaign type, timing, and industry. Across the analyzed campaigns, the average open rate was 11.0%, and the average click-through rate was 1.2%. However, these platform-wide averages masked significant differences between campaign types and audiences.
One of the strongest findings was the relationship between campaign size and engagement. Campaigns sent to fewer than 100 recipients achieved a 23.6% open rate and 4.8% CTR, compared with 5.7% opens and 0.4% CTR for campaigns reaching more than 100,000 people. Smaller campaigns therefore generated roughly 4x more opens and 12x more clicks.
Automation also showed a big performance advantage. Triggered and automated emails reached a 31.4% open rate and 6.4% CTR, compared with 11.0% opens and 1.2% CTR for mass campaigns. Automated messages were opened almost three times as often and generated 5.3x more clicks.
Here are some key points of the study:
● Smaller campaigns generated significantly stronger engagement. Newsletter sent to fewer than 100 recipients got a 4.8% CTR, compared with just 0.4% for campaigns sent to more than 100,000 recipients.
● Automated emails outperformed mass campaigns. Triggered and automated messages reached a 31.4% open rate and 6.4% CTR, generating 5.3x more clicks than mass campaigns.
● The most popular send time was not the best-performing one. Around 109 million emails were sent between 2 PM and 3 PM, yet open rates at those hours were only 8.8% and 7.8%, both below the platform average. At 8 AM and 12 PM, open rates reached 12.9%.
● Tuesday produced the strongest weekday engagement, with a 12.6% open rate and 1.44% CTR. Friday, meanwhile, had a delivery rate of just 87.3%, compared with approximately 91–92% on most weekdays.
● Common subject-line tactics did not always improve performance. Emails with emojis in their subject lines had a 0.75% CTR, compared with 1.68% without emojis. Subjects containing numbers or percentages also underperformed, while question-style subject lines reached a 12.4% open rate and 1.74% CTR.
● Email benchmarks varied almost fourfold by industry. Tourism campaigns averaged a 30.2% open rate, compared with 7.7% for marketing agencies. Nonprofits reached 23.0%, while IT campaigns averaged 8.9%.
● Changes in sender behavior can significantly distort platform-wide benchmarks. Casino and betting campaign volume grew from around 80 campaigns per month in August 2025 to 61,923 in June 2026 — an approximately 774x increase — with many campaigns targeting only 12–27 recipients.
● Loss of interest was the dominant reason for unsubscribing. Among roughly 173,000 unsubscribers who provided a reason, 83.5% said they were no longer interested, compared with just 6.8% who said emails were sent too frequently.
"Smaller, more focused sends performed better, automated messages worked because they arrived in the right context, and even the most popular send time was not the strongest one. The closer a message is to a real customer action, need, or moment, the more likely it is to earn attention. Marketers should look less for a single ‘best practice’ and more at whether each message has a clear reason to reach that specific audience at that specific moment,” says Andrew Dyuzhov, Marketing Director at Selzy.
Complete research results are available here
About Selzy
Selzy is an email marketing platform designed for small and midsize businesses that need an affordable and easy-to-use solution for creating, automating, and managing email campaigns. It combines a drag-and-drop email builder, ready-made templates, audience segmentation, automation, AI tools, and campaign analytics in one platform, with no coding or design skills required.
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Contact
Selzy
Irina Shateeva
+573103939123
https://selzy.com
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Source: 38 Digital Market News
Release ID: 2627229
