How does your newsletter’s click rate compare to others?
Usually that’s a hard question to answer. But because GlueLetter newsletter analytics provides advanced newsletter data analysis for dozens of leading news publishers, we have exclusive access to email engagement trends across the newsletter industry.
This analysis includes:
- more than 9,000 email campaigns
- nearly 500 different newsletter products
- 255 million opens
- 25.5 million clicks
- Data from a variety of ESPs including Mailchimp, Sailthru, ActiveCampaign, HubSpot, Campaign Monitor, Constant Contact, Iterable, Cordial, Pardot, Sendgrid, and others
…that we tracked between Jan. 1 to March 31 of 2025.
See why so many leading publishers turn to GlueLetter to supercharge their email data analysis
Click rate averages
The median click-through rate across all newsletter campaigns in Q1 of 2025 was 7.65%.
The middle half of campaigns recorded a click rate somewhere between 4.45% and 12.67%. Which means if your click rate was above 12.7% you are in the top 25% of newsletters, and if you are below 4.5% you are in the bottom 25%.
| Your click rate… | GlueLetter’s evaluation… |
| 2.5% | Poor (bottom 10% of newsletters) |
| 4.5% | Lagging (bottom 25% of newsletters) |
| 7.65% | Normal (better than 50% of newsletters) |
| 12.7% | Great (better than 75% of newsletters) |
| 19.6% | Super (better than 90% of newsletters) |
Keep in mind of course that any given newsletter may be more or less focused on driving clicks as an outcome. Some newsletters include most of the information in the email itself and are intended to be consumed as their own product, rather than to drive a high rate of clicks. If that’s true for you, you may be interested in our Open Rates benchmarking data.
Methodology
Click Rate: GlueLetter calculates this as the percentage of openers who click at least one link. In your ESP, this might be labeled something like “Unique Click Rate” or “Click-to-Opens Rate”. (Be careful to not compare these numbers to a “Click-to-Sends Rate”, which may also be available in your ESP.)
Non-human or “bot” clicks are filtered: This analysis excludes clicks that are determined to be caused by spam filters or other automated non-human systems. (GlueLetter applies its own bot filtering to imported clicks, and some ESPs provide bot filtering that GlueLetter ingests as well.) If your own click rate metric is based on all clicks and does not excluding any bot activity, expect your rate to be marginally higher than the ones listed here.
Detailed percentiles breakdown for click rates
If you want to get more specific, here are the click rates GlueLetter recorded at percentiles from 5% up to 95%. For example, if your score is near the “40th percentile” that means your click rate is higher than 40% of other newsletters (and lower than the other 60%).
| Open rate | Percentile |
| 1.62% | 5th percentile |
| 2.52% | 10th percentile |
| 3.22% | 15th percentile |
| 3.85% | 20th percentile |
| 4.45% | 25th percentile |
| 5.01% | 30th percentile |
| 5.59% | 35th percentile |
| 6.23% | 40th percentile |
| 6.91% | 45th percentile |
| 7.65% | 50th percentile |
| 8.38% | 55th percentile |
| 9.31% | 60th percentile |
| 10.26% | 65th percentile |
| 11.40% | 70th percentile |
| 12.67% | 75th percentile |
| 14.29% | 80th percentile |
| 16.39% | 85th percentile |
| 19.60% | 90th percentile |
| 25.61% | 95th percentile |
More data
Other metrics: See our similar benchmarking data for Open Rates. We will soon publish a similar analysis of benchmarking trends for Unsubscribe Rates.
Future updates
We plan to update these datasets at the end of each quarter (every three months). Sign up for email updates below, and follow GlueLetter and our founder Jeff Sonderman on LinkedIn for regular updates.
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