Why Email Opens Are Up but Engagement is Falling
Insights and Takeaways from Zeta's Q2 2025 Benchmark Report
In a constantly shifting digital landscape, email remains one of the most dependable channels for reaching customers. Yet the patterns of how people engage with email are changing in ways that matter. The recent Q2 2025 Zeta Email Marketing Benchmark Report shows a clear shift: open rates are climbing significantly across many industries, while click rates and post-open engagement are failing to keep pace.
For marketers, this divergence is more than a statistical quirk. It’s a signal that the rules of the game are changing.
In this post, we unpack the key findings from Zeta’s benchmark data, explore why this shift is happening, and offer tactical recommendations to help you adapt. Ultimately, this isn’t about relying on opens anymore. It’s about making the moment after the open count.
Open Rates Are Up Across All Industries
One of the standout takeaways of Zeta’s Q2 2025 benchmark is how broadly and sharply open rates have risen. Take the Retail sector as an example: total open rate jumped from 46.0% in Q2 2024 to 55.0% in Q2 2025. Unique open rate rose from 36.4% to 44.1%. Even the “true” open rate metric, which attempts to capture more meaningful opens, increased.
These gains suggest improvements in factors that get emails noticed in the inbox. Better subject lines. Stronger inbox placement. Improved list hygiene. More effective segmentation and targeting. They may also reflect broader shifts in how people check email, from mobile use to preview panes to changes in default inbox behavior.
In short: brands seem to be getting better at capturing attention.
The Problem: Click-to-Open and Click Rates Are Declining
Here’s where it gets interesting. While open rates are up, the metrics that actually drive business results tell a different story. Click-to-open rates and overall click rates are declining across most sectors. This means that even though more people are opening emails, fewer are taking action once they’re inside.
Think about what that means. You’re working harder to get into the inbox. Your subject lines are performing. Your sends are landing. But when subscribers open your email, they’re not clicking through. They’re not converting. They’re not engaging with your content in ways that move the needle.
This disconnect should worry every email marketer. Because opens without engagement are just vanity metrics. They make your dashboards look good but don’t translate to revenue, retention, or real customer relationships.
Not All Industries Are Feeling the Same Impact
Zeta’s data also highlights that not all sectors are experiencing these shifts the same way. While Retail shows strong open-rate gains, other verticals like Financial Services & Insurance (FSI) and Media show more muted results.
This variation underscores a critical point: benchmark data is useful for context, but it doesn’t replace the need to understand your audience, your value proposition, and your content strategy. What works for a retail brand may not work for a media company or a finance firm.
In an environment where opens don’t guarantee engagement, relying solely on generic campaigns becomes riskier. The need for relevance, targeting, and value becomes more urgent.
What’s Driving the Disconnect Between Opens and Actions
Why are we seeing this growing gap between opens and clicks? Based on Zeta’s report and what broader industry data suggests, several factors likely contribute:
- Inbox behavior and tracking changes. With developments in privacy, email client behavior, and inbox preview mechanics, more opens may now be “passive.” Not a reader deliberately clicking and engaging, but an automatic or cursory open. This inflates open rates while providing little real engagement.
- Subject lines optimized for opens, but content not optimized for clicks. Teams may still focus heavily on writing punchy subject lines and rely on opens as success signals, while neglecting the email body, CTA design, or landing page experience.
- Real or perceived email fatigue. Recipients may open an email out of curiosity, habit, or auto-preview, but not engage further if the content feels generic, irrelevant, or overly promotional.
- Misalignment between expectation and deliverable. If the promise implied by the subject line or preview doesn’t match the value inside (in content, offer, or relevance), recipients may opt out before clicking.
These dynamics suggest that open rate alone is no longer a reliable proxy for engagement or business impact. The metric that mattered for years is losing its predictive power.
What Marketers Should Do in 2026: Focus on Post-Open Value
Given the evolving email landscape and benchmark shifts, here are some strategic priorities for marketers heading into 2026:
- Prioritize content relevance and clarity from the first line. If the inbox hook gets the open, the email body needs to deliver. Clear value. Compelling language. A strong, relevant CTA that feels natural, not pushy.
- Segment and personalize more aggressively. With mixed performance across industries and audiences, generic blasts are increasingly risky. Tailored emails based on behavior, lifecycle stage, or interests will likely perform better. The data supports it.
- Design for meaningful engagement, not just opens. Optimize CTA placement. Make the path to conversion obvious. Ensure landing pages deliver on the email’s promise. Every element should guide the reader forward, not distract or confuse.
- Use benchmarks as directional guides, not hard goals. The benchmark data provides a helpful reference, but every brand’s audience is unique. Track your own metrics. Test. Iterate. What works for someone else might not work for you.
- Measure beyond opens. Track clicks, conversions, downstream behavior, and revenue per email. With opens becoming less meaningful, success should be defined by real impact: engagement, conversion, retention. The metrics that actually connect to business outcomes.
The shift is simple: stop optimizing for the open and start optimizing for what happens next.
What This Means for Email Strategy (and WhatCounts Clients)
For marketers and brands using a mature ESP or working with a partner like WhatCounts, the message is clear: the game has changed. Good inbox placement or catchy subject lines are no longer enough.
In 2026, email strategy needs to be built around delivering value, not just visibility. That means better segmentation, smarter content, more purposeful CTAs, and a relentless focus on what happens after the open.
If you treat the open as just the start of a journey, and design everything that follows to guide recipients toward real engagement, email can remain one of the most powerful and profitable channels in your mix.
Benchmarks like Zeta’s provide useful perspective. But your numbers (your list, your audience, your brand) are what matter most. Use benchmarks as guideposts. Use your own data as the roadmap.
In the end, capturing attention is just the first step. The real work, and the real value, happens when you turn that attention into action.
