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. You can be the only one a person gets, or one of two.

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%
Open rate, earlier on	About 60%, then about 56% as they grew
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. 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?

A 6% click rate on a new local list is really good. My senior-focused newsletter runs a 13.5% click rate, and seniors engage roughly twice as much as my general local audiences.

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.

"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%.

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. Local audiences open.

How do you raise open rates?

• Send from a person's name: "Firstname at Brand."
• Keep subject lines to one line.
• 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.