Seeking Credible Industry Benchmarks for Customer Newsletters to Existing Clients

·Aug 13, 2026 04:27 PM·

Hello all! Looking for customer newsletter benchmarks! I’m finding plenty of industry benchmarks for B2B email marketing overall, but very little specifically focused on newsletters sent to existing customers. Does anyone have a credible industry report or benchmark source they use for customer newsletters? Would love something I can reference and point back to. Thanks!

5 comments

· Sorted by Oldest

Ashley Christiano
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I had been looking for the same thing earlier this year and had the same problem. Here's how we were thinking about it in the abscence of better benchmarking. We gathered email metrics for:
Ourcustomer emails overall
The different types of customer newsletters (i.e. product newsletter vs content vs vertical-specific)
Our prospect newsletter
From there we were able to identify the weak spots for the customer newsletters - they were still driving opens, but clicks had decayed in 2026 (more so for content-focused newsletters). Was definitely seeing that more sections are no longer better lol. Instead, people were more looking for tips, use cases, things that gave them more value and utility.
Ashley Christiano
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It did help that we tracked every month exactly what links people clicked in in our newsletters, and each link was categorized by theme, content type, and whether it was news/evergreen/or urgent.
Gabrielle Herrera
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HubSpot sunset our customer newsletter a couple years ago due to under performance. I'll have to pull up the benchmarks referenced to confirm if they were industry or company set.
Irwin Hipsman
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Lizzy Samples When I was at Forrester we did some informal benchmarking. For an all customer NL 20% seemed to be the norm. Less than 15% is danger zone. More than 30% is impressive. Now that all depends. Weekly will probably do worse than monthly. Segmented will do better than non-segmented. So, a product update NL to admins that comes out when there is something to say can achieve 60%. Here's a TIP- The easiest way to increase open rates is the clean up the customer contact database. In many companies, 20% of the database is out of date as those people don't even work for the company. Or, someone got a user name / password 3 years ago and has not logged in for 18 months or ever opened an email from customer marketing. Determine some guidelines and segment those people out. They are not going to open the next email. Happy to talk as I help companies update and enrich their customer contact databases.
Rose Fried
·
·
I send out a CAB newsletter quarterly and have very low open rates this year. Looking forward to meeting with our CAB members to get some feedback.

Ashley Christiano
·
·
I had been looking for the same thing earlier this year and had the same problem. Here's how we were thinking about it in the abscence of better benchmarking. We gathered email metrics for:
Ourcustomer emails overall
The different types of customer newsletters (i.e. product newsletter vs content vs vertical-specific)
Our prospect newsletter
From there we were able to identify the weak spots for the customer newsletters - they were still driving opens, but clicks had decayed in 2026 (more so for content-focused newsletters). Was definitely seeing that more sections are no longer better lol. Instead, people were more looking for tips, use cases, things that gave them more value and utility.
Ashley Christiano
·
·
It did help that we tracked every month exactly what links people clicked in in our newsletters, and each link was categorized by theme, content type, and whether it was news/evergreen/or urgent.
Gabrielle Herrera
·
·
HubSpot sunset our customer newsletter a couple years ago due to under performance. I'll have to pull up the benchmarks referenced to confirm if they were industry or company set.
Irwin Hipsman
·
·
Lizzy Samples When I was at Forrester we did some informal benchmarking. For an all customer NL 20% seemed to be the norm. Less than 15% is danger zone. More than 30% is impressive. Now that all depends. Weekly will probably do worse than monthly. Segmented will do better than non-segmented. So, a product update NL to admins that comes out when there is something to say can achieve 60%. Here's a TIP- The easiest way to increase open rates is the clean up the customer contact database. In many companies, 20% of the database is out of date as those people don't even work for the company. Or, someone got a user name / password 3 years ago and has not logged in for 18 months or ever opened an email from customer marketing. Determine some guidelines and segment those people out. They are not going to open the next email. Happy to talk as I help companies update and enrich their customer contact databases.
Rose Fried
·
·
I send out a CAB newsletter quarterly and have very low open rates this year. Looking forward to meeting with our CAB members to get some feedback.