Deployteq Thought Leadership | 2026 Benchmark Reflections
Email isn’t “back.” It never left. But it has evolved. Our 2026 analysis of billions of messages sent across industries shows a channel that is more resilient, more real time, and far more intent driven than the batch and blast era it outgrew years ago. As organisations lean into automation, segmentation, and first party or zero party data, inboxes are becoming home to conversations, not just campaigns.
This piece distils what we see in the Deployteq Email Benchmark 2026 and places it in market context, so you can calibrate your strategy for the year ahead.
👉 TL;DR for busy marketers
Deliverability is a strategy, not a metric. Strong acceptance rates correlate with better engagement management, reactivation programmes, sunsetting practices, and channel wide contact pressure control.
Opens are up, but interpret them carefully. Behavioural triggers and stricter audience hygiene inflate opens, and weekend sends still underperform. Use click through rate (CTR) and click to open (CTO) to judge message quality. External research reinforces the shift from visibility metrics to intent metrics, including CTR, CTO, and conversions.
Journeys beat one offs. The biggest performance lifts come from lifecycle flows and decision stage support, not single blasts, especially in B2B and service heavy verticals.
Omnichannel orchestration matters. Email’s impact grows when you manage total communication pressure across email, SMS, push, and messaging apps, instead of optimising channels in isolation.
What our benchmark shows, and what it means
1. Deliverability remains extremely strong
Acceptance rate (average)
| Industry/Year | 2022 | 2023 | 2024 | 2025 |
| Average | 99,80% | 99,70% | 99,50% | 99,60% |
This level of deliverability is sustained by better list hygiene, more intelligent engagement based sending, and stricter filtering of inactive contacts. Telecom and Energy continue to outperform because their emails are often service led and expected by recipients.
Why this matters: Inbox placement is increasingly determined by engagement signals and authenticated identity, including SPF, DKIM, and DMARC, not simply list size. According to Clean Email’s 2025 industry analysis, mailbox providers now weigh sender reputation, complaint levels, and interaction rates far more heavily as part of their filtering behaviour.
2. Open rates continue to rise, interpret with care
Average open rate
| Industry/Year | 2022 | 2023 | 2024 | 2025 |
| Average | 36,60% | 52,00% | 51,70% | 56,90% |
Open rates are rising due to behaviour based triggers, cleaner active audiences, and more mature personalisation practices. However, marketing research and independent forecasting organisations, note that privacy changes have inflated opens artificially. As a result, open rate should be treated as a directional indicator rather than a measure of message quality.
Deployteq takeaway: Use open rate to monitor deliverability health at the macro level. Evaluate content performance using CTR, CTO, and conversion metrics.
3. CTR remains stable to slightly up
Click Through Rate (average)
| Industry/Year | 2022 | 2023 | 2024 | 2025 |
| Average | 3,00% | 2,80% | 4,90% | 5,00% |
CTR improvements reflect the shift toward relevance and better segmentation. Industries like Energy, Finance, and Telecom outperform because messages tend to support tasks or provide service related value.
External sources such as WebToffee confirm that global CTR averages tend to sit between 2% and 3.6%, meaning Deployteq customers show stronger click performance overall due to their maturity in lifecycle and behavioural targeting.
Deployteq takeaway: Avoid comparing your CTR to a single global figure. Benchmark against your industry and your send mix, including the proportion of trigger based vs. broadcast mail.
4. CTO dips slightly, even as total clicks grow
Click to Open Rate (average)
| Industry/Year | 2022 | 2023 | 2024 | 2025 |
| Average | 10,30% | 5,30% | 8,60% | 7,90% |
Although CTO dipped slightly, this is expected because open rates rose faster than clicks. Many messages opened in 2025 were informational, transactional, or reassurance based, which generally yield fewer clicks.
External research from forecasting organisations describes healthy CTO ranges as sitting between 5% and 8%, meaning Deployteq customers continue to perform strongly.
Deployteq takeaway: Assess CTO relative to the intent of the email. Not every opened email is supposed to generate clicks.
6 trends shaping email in 2026, with expert perspectives from global agencies
“Email is no longer a static broadcast channel. In 2026 it is the place for direct interaction. By using customer preferences intelligently, you stop guessing and build automated dialogues that are essential for achieving your business ambitions.”
– Sofie Emmen, E-mail & Marketing Automation Specialist, NOBEARS
Deployteq takeaway: Map 8 to 12 core lifecycle flows, from welcome to onboarding, activation, replenishment, renewal, and lapse rescue. Set one north star metric per flow, not per campaign.
“In B2B, email is shifting from campaign driven to decision driven. It is not the mailing itself that matters, but the role email plays in the See Think Do process. Organisations that connect email to buyer intent data and sales input perform significantly better.”
– Mike Joppe, Managing Partner, Lead Today
Deployteq takeaway: Use predictive segments to decide who should receive what and when. When data is limited, build content scaffolds, same structure, but variable messaging depending on behavioural clusters.
“Poor inbox placement in 2026 isn’t just a technical problem; it’s a relevance problem.
If you send generic content to someone you know enough about to send a personalized message, you’ll be penalized.”
Elise Menkveld-Verwijs, Team lead E-mail Marketing, Wander Journeys
Deployteq takeaway: Enforce DMARC, consider BIMI, implement graduated sunsetting, and build reactivation flows that provide value, not guilt.
“In 2026, marketing automation is about guarding total communication pressure. Every touchpoint counts. Only by orchestrating pressure across all channels do you stay relevant.”
– Joep van Ham, Teamlead Marketing Automation, Happy Horizon
Deployteq takeaway: Maintain a channel agnostic contact ledger and implement global frequency caps.
Open rates are no longer reliable, so leading teams benchmark using CTR, CTO, conversion rate, and unsubscribe trends. Industry experts note that unsubscribe increases caused by easier one click UX actually improve list quality over time.
“Growth does not live in the next campaign, it lives in flows aligned to customer phase, intent, and behaviour.”
– Arno Tenkink, Sr. CX Consultant, Follo
Deployteq takeaway: Benchmark against peers with similar audiences and similar send mixes. Track complaint rates separately from unsubscribes.
Partner perspective:
Email is interactive, decision supporting, journey driven, engagement dependent, and orchestration powered. Maturity, not volume, drives results.
Deployteq takeaway: Benchmark against peers with similar audiences and similar send mixes. Track complaint rates separately from unsubscribes.
What good looks like in 2026
| Maturity Area | Signs You’re On Track | Common Pitfall | Correction |
| Audience Strategy | Segments built on behaviour and intent | Demographic slicing without predictive lift | Use propensity models or at minimum activity driven rules |
| Content and Journeys | Flows aligned to See Think Do, each email does one job | Overstuffed newsletters | Break sends into sequenced micro moments |
| Omnichannel | Unified pressure rules across channels | Siloed channel teams | Introduce global caps and shared suppressions |
| Measurement | CTOR, CTR, conversions lead, incrementality tests applied | Open rate fixation | Add holdouts and journey KPIs |
The bottom line
“We strongly rely on benchmarking: we don’t make decisions based on gut feeling, but on data that proves what truly delivers value.”
– Madée Reinerink, Marketing Automation Specialist, Friday Digital Agency
If you benchmark smartly, design for intent, and orchestrate across channels, you will continue earning your place in the inbox message after message.
