I’ve been helping a client benchmark their newsletter metrics and kept running into the same problem: everyone quotes different numbers, and nobody agrees on what “good” looks like.
So I pulled together the benchmarks from the data behind 50+ newsletters with 100k to 2M+ subscribers. Then I built this calculator so you can plug in your own stats and see where you stand.
A few things worth knowing before you start.
These are opinions, not universal law. They’re based on one person’s experience across a specific set of successful newsletters. Your situation might be the exception. If you’re running a niche B2B newsletter to 3,000 people who all buy from you, a 35% open rate might be perfectly fine.
Open rates are broken. Apple Mail Privacy Protection now pre-fetches emails, which inflates open rates across the board. The number is still worth tracking — it moves directionally when things change — but don’t treat it as gospel. Click-through rate is a more reliable signal of actual engagement.
Unsubscribe rate depends on frequency. A weekly newsletter will almost always have a higher per-send unsub rate than a daily one. The benchmarks here are general. If you send weekly, aim for “Okay” or better. Daily senders should target “Great” or above.
CPA is the hardest metric to benchmark. Your cost per subscriber on Meta depends on how much you’re spending (higher spend = higher bids), your total addressable market (smaller audience = more expensive), your subscriber lifetime value (if your LTV is $100, paying $10 per sub might make perfect sense), and your payback period. A newsletter spending $300k/month on ads will have a very different CPA than one spending $2k. The numbers below assume moderate spend targeting US audiences.
Free-to-paid conversion depends on what you’re selling. The benchmarks assume a digital product or subscription priced between $50 and $300. If you’re selling a $2,000 course and converting 1% of free readers, you’re doing exceptionally well — but this calculator would rate that as “Bad.” Use your judgment.
Welcome email metrics matter more than you think. There’s a direct correlation between welcome email engagement and long-term list health. If your welcome email underperforms, your ongoing metrics will too.
Plug in what you have. Skip what you don’t. The calculator benchmarks whatever you give it.
