You send a newsletter, watch the open rate roll in, and immediately wonder if that number is good or something to worry about. The answer depends less on gut feeling and more on knowing what "standard" actually looks like for your industry right now.
Yes, it's hard to chase a moving goal, but knowing what good actually looks like helps you gauge if your strategies are working or need some work.
Here's the short version: publisher open rates tend to run lower than most other industries. That's not necessarily a red flag. It's a pattern worth understanding so you can set realistic goals and know when something actually needs fixing.
What counts as a standard email open rate right now
Across all industries, the median email open rate in 2025 was 43.46%, up slightly from 42.35% in 2024, according to a report across 3.6 million campaigns. That's the average. It's not the benchmark that matters most to you.
For publishing companies specifically, the picture looks different. Publishers landed near the bottom of the list at 34.24%, ahead of only e-commerce (32.67%) and travel and transportation (30.10%). Media outlets, a closely related category, performed better at 42.97%, closer to the overall average.
Publishers do have a bright spot, though. Click-to-open rate, which measures how many people who open an email also click something inside it, was strong for both publishing companies (9.12%) and media (12.92%), the third-highest CTOR of any industry tracked. In plain terms: publisher audiences that open the email tend to be genuinely engaged readers, not just curious skimmers.
One caveat worth flagging: Apple Mail Privacy Protection can automatically mark emails as "opened" for a large share of inboxes, which inflates open rate data across every industry. Real open rates are likely somewhat lower than these numbers suggest, which is part of why click rate and click-to-open rate are becoming more reliable engagement signals than opens alone.
Why are publisher open rates lower?
A few things explain the gap.
Volume works against you. As a content publisher, you typically send more frequently than a retailer running occasional promotions or a nonprofit sending quarterly updates. More frequency means more competition for attention, and inboxes get selective.
Diverse content means uneven relevance. A single newsletter often covers multiple topics, and not every subscriber cares about all of them. If someone signed up for your business coverage but keeps receiving sports roundups, they'll open less often, even if they still value your publication overall.
Lists grow large and uneven. Contact lists often include long-time loyal subscribers next to people who signed up once for a single article and never engaged again. Averages get pulled down by contacts who were never going to open regardless of subject line quality.
None of this means your numbers are locked in. It means the fixes look different for publishers than they do for other industries.
What actually moves the needle for publisher open rates?
Send content people actually asked for
The single biggest lever for publishers is relevance, not clever subject lines. The most-opened campaigns use subscriber segments or filters compared to average campaigns. If your business desk and your entertainment desk are going out in the same email to everyone, you're diluting both.
Breaking subscribers into groups based on stated interests, past clicks, or site behavior lets you send fewer, more relevant emails to each group instead of one broad email to everyone. Our guide on advanced segmentation strategies covers specific ways to slice a publisher list by engagement and topic.
Fix your subject lines and preheaders
A few small, testable tweaks consistently outperform average sends:
- Keep subject lines between 20 and 40 characters. The most-opened campaigns were 45% more likely to fall in this range.
- Use a custom preheader. Top campaigns were 23% more likely to include one instead of letting the inbox auto-populate a preview.
- Add an emoji when it fits your brand voice. Top-performing campaigns were 21% more likely to use one in the subject line.
These are small changes, but they add up across every send, every day.
Send at the right time
Timing affects opens more than most publishers assume. Data pointed to the 3 PM to 7 PM window as the strongest for opens across accounts. That's worth testing against your own list, since news cycles and reader habits vary by beat and by audience.
Clean your list regularly
Contacts who haven't opened anything in months are dragging your open rate down every single send. Removing or re-engaging inactive subscribers is one of the fastest ways to see your percentage climb, even without changing a word of your content.
Personalize what each subscriber actually sees
This is where publishers have an edge most other industries don't: a content feed that's constantly refreshing. Instead of sending the same article list to your entire subscriber base, you can tailor which stories each person sees based on what they've clicked before. Our personalization guide walks through the mechanics of building this kind of relevance into your program.
How Delivra helps publishers close the gap
Delivra is a marketing automation platform built for data-rich small marketing teams, and publishers are exactly the kind of team we mean. You're managing large subscriber lists, diverse content categories, subscription revenue, and advertiser relationships, often without a large staff to do it manually.
A few features are built specifically to help publishers push past standard benchmarks:
AI-Personalized RSS Campaigns turn your content feed into automated, individually relevant newsletters. Instead of sending the same article roundup to your entire list, this feature analyzes each subscriber's past clicks, preference center selections, and site behavior to select the stories most likely to earn an open—no manual segmentation required. You can read more about how it works in our recent product update or check the step-by-step knowledge base guide.
Unified subscriber profiles pull email, SMS, subscription status, and engagement data into one view of each reader, so segmentation is based on real behavior instead of guesswork.
Automated renewal and win-back workflows keep subscription revenue steady without manual follow-up. IBJ Media used Delivra to build a fully automated renewal system that adjusts messaging based on payment status and behavioral triggers.
Paved integration lets you drop native ads directly into your campaigns and track performance alongside your other analytics, turning engaged readers into a real revenue stream.
Unbeatable deliverability, backed by strict customer vetting, means your carefully segmented, carefully personalized email actually reaches the inbox instead of getting filtered out before a reader ever sees the subject line.
Set your own benchmark, then beat it
Industry averages are a useful starting point, not a finish line. Standard email open rates for publishers sit lower than most industries, but the strength of your click-to-open rate shows your engaged readers are paying real attention once they open. The work now is getting more subscribers to that first click.
Segmentation, smarter timing, cleaner lists, and content that's personalized to each reader's actual interests will move your numbers closer to—and eventually past—the benchmark.
Ready to see what that looks like for your publication? Talk to our sales team and find out how Delivra can help you turn more opens into more engaged, more valuable subscribers.
