What is a good open rate for a local newsletter?

The general email benchmark is about 25% opens, if they're lucky. Thirty to 40% is very, very good. Local newsletters can beat both. Most local newsletters that are good, which is rare, get around a 50% open rate.

Local is different from the tech and entrepreneur world, where inboxes are overrun. Most normal people don't sign up for many newsletters, and people really care about where they live. You can be the only one a person gets, or one of two.

That raises the bar. A 47% open rate would be really good for newsletters in general. For a local newsletter, I'd call it average.

What open and click rates do your newsletters get?

Situation	What I see
Open rate, typical	40 to 55%
A good local newsletter, steady state	Around 50%
My flagship, about 11,600 subscribers	52% opens, 6% clicks
A suburban Texas brand, about 11,000 subscribers	54% opens, 7% clicks
My first two lists, early 2025	56% and 61% opens, 9% and 12% clicks
My very first list, first weeks	60% to 66% opens, 18% to 26% clicks
A brand-new launch	56%, with a 6% click rate
Open rate, fastest-growing and cheapest-to-acquire brand	About 28 to 30%, my only weak one
A brand that went eight weeks without issues	Started 10 to 15 points below my others
Click rate, typical	3 to 8%

It varies by brand. Some of my markets crush it and I can't tell you why, since I run the same formula everywhere. Unsubscribes stay low. I don't watch subscribe rates closely, so don't take those numbers as gospel for your market.

What about click rate?

Click rate is the number I trust more. Open rates get skewed by bots and by Apple's privacy features, so treat them as an estimate and a signal. Clicks show what's really going on.

• 1% to 3%: what most newsletters get. Corporate newsletters nobody chose to read sit at 1% or less.
• About 5%: good, not amazing, for a newsletter people actually want.
• 7% to 8%: you're doing really well.
• Double digits: rare air.

A 6% click rate on a new local list is really good. My senior-focused newsletter runs a 13.5% click rate, and one early send hit about 20%: roughly 200 clicks from about 800 people, before the content was even good. Seniors engage roughly twice as much as my general local audiences.

Clicks also follow what you put in. When one brand went to twice a week and left event links out of one issue, click rate dropped, because events are what people click most. Someone I trust told me not to sweat it, since people were clearly still reading.

Why do open rates drop as you grow?

Scale fast on paid acquisition and opens fall. My fastest-growing brand is also my worst performer on opens. Part of it is geography: when the ads work really well, more of the people subscribing probably don't live in the town.

"One in five or one in ten newsletters will go gangbusters and we get subscribers for dirt cheap, 20 or 30 cents each. Those will have a lower open rate, five, eight, ten percent lower, and then you should just unsubscribe those people and you're still doing good."

A cheap pocket on Meta brings in a lot of people, and some of them don't open. That's the trade. You got them cheap, so remove the inactive ones and keep going.

Also watch open rate next to your cost per subscriber. My cheapest-to-grow list is my worst opener. I don't claim one causes the other, since a lot of things affect open rates, but I always look at both numbers together.

A slow slide as a list grows is normal. A drop from 60% to 56% is relatively standard, and a 56% launch will come down over time. I treat it as a normal side effect of growth, not an emergency.

What isn't normal: one launch underperforming while five others, set up identically at the same time, look fine. I've had that happen and never figured out why.

Are averages misleading?

They can be. My ops lead pointed out that automation removing non-openers over time inflates your average open rate across issues. A newsletter that cleans its list will look better than one that doesn't, even with the same readers.

Compare your numbers against your own history, not someone else's screenshot.

When should you worry?

At about 30% to 33%. That's my line for switching a newsletter to sending mainly to people who've opened recently. I had my team audit every brand for anything at or below 33%. If a newer list is sitting around 25% instead of 40%-plus, something's wrong.

What are other operators seeing?

A guest on my podcast who runs a boutique local newsletter reported open rates over 50%. Another guest's Tennessee newsletter hovered around 72%, and a seasonal shore-town newsletter with about 17,000 subscribers sat over 50%. A part-time operator I worked with had a dormant 3,200-subscriber list still showing a 52% open rate.

The biggest outlier I know of is a local business newsletter with over 10,000 subscribers, about a 75% open rate and a click rate in the twenties, grown mostly without paid ads. Those are his numbers. I expect niche brands built for a specific community to beat general local brands on engagement, because readers feel much closer to them.

How do you use these numbers to sell?

Keep it simple for small business owners. Skip the jargon and say your click rate is several times the industry norm. Then point out the difference from mail: when you send a postcard to someone's door, nobody knows who looked at it. With a newsletter, you do.

How do you raise open rates?

• Send from a person's name: "Firstname at Brand."
• Give people a reason to open, like a meme at the end. A landscaper's newsletter I do runs about 60% and the owner credits the memes.
• Lead with events, which is what readers say they care about most.
• Get the welcome email to people fast, especially from lead forms.
• Be ready to publish a real issue as soon as you start running ads. An eight-week gap with only a welcome email left one of my brands 10 to 15 points lower at the start.
• Clean or suppress people who haven't engaged in months.