AI Advisor to Improve Email Open and Click Rates

How to use it

1. Enter your open rate and click rate from your email tool, ideally averaged over your last few sends. Add your unsubscribe rate and list size if you have them.
2. Choose how often you send, add your industry (optional) and click Generate with AI.
3. You get three suggestions, most important first. Try them one at a time over your next issues and judge the results across several sends.

What each number tells you

• Open rate: the share of delivered emails that were opened. It reflects your subject line, sender name and whether you reach the inbox at all, but it tends to overstate reality.
• Click rate: the share of delivered emails in which a link was clicked. It shows that people read and acted, so it is your most reliable signal.
• Unsubscribe rate: the share of people who opted out after one send. A sudden jump means your content or frequency has drifted from what people signed up for.

Why Apple Mail Privacy Protection inflates open rates

An open is counted when a tiny image in the email loads. With Apple Mail Privacy Protection turned on, Apple loads those images in the background when the email arrives, so emails can be counted as opened even if nobody read them. Readers who block images, on the other hand, are not counted even when they do read.

So an open rate above 50% is not necessarily good news, and comparing it with other companies' averages can mislead. This tool tells the AI to treat open rates as a rough guide and to weigh click rates more heavily.

Rough averages to compare with

Benchmark Email's 2026 report puts the average open rate at 25.54% and the click rate at 1.45%. Mailchimp's figures (updated December 2023, campaigns sent to 1,000+ subscribers) are 35.63% opens and 2.62% clicks. In short, opens of around 25–35% and clicks of around 1–3% are common.

These vary a lot by industry and audience, so the most useful comparison is with your own earlier sends. For unsubscribes, 0.5% or less per send is a commonly used guide.

How this tool works

Your numbers are sent to an AI model (Anthropic's Claude) to write the advice. We don't save your input. The AI is told not to invent facts about your business and not to promise results. The suggestions are based on general practice, so judge whether they fit your readers.

In Newsletter Ready, the Analytics page charts open and click rates issue by issue and shows your most-clicked articles; press Ask AI to get advice for your next issue based on your actual numbers.

FAQ