Hatchery.co

List size: ~21,000 emails. Open Rates: 16% - 34%.

A monthly subscription site that sends you food tastings. Seems like they have pretty high open rates, but relatively low click-through rates.

That can be totally normal if their newsletters are typically not trying to push customers to the website.

I also noticed they are often sending out their promo emails on Wednesday's and Saturday's. Those both are the lowest open-rate days! They might want to make sure they send promo emails on either Monday, Tuesday, Thursday.

ShivarWeb.com

List size: ~1,400 Open Rates: 18% - 22%

This is actually a very highly trafficked blog, but not a big email list. The upside is with some optimization he can definitely build a larger list with all the traffic he gets.

Peri10k.com by Katya Varbanova

List size: ~200 Open Rates: 25% - 58%

This site is a group of Periscope users who livestream. While this is a pretty small list (around 200 people), it's what most people will start out at.

Sometimes seeing the stats behind gigantic 100,000+ email lists is interesting for people, but not useful. While this list may be small, it does have very high engagement.

OkDork.com by Noah Kagan:

List size: ~47,000 at time.  Currently ~140,000. Open Rates: 28% - 32%

Here’s a sample of a blog that was dormant for a while, then Noah decided to grow it starting January 2014 (I watched him do it). He started with 12,000 email subscribers, and by September 2014 had nearly 50,000 subscribers.

This was all done through guest posting, guest podcasting, being Jewish, and just putting out cool stuff on a consistent basis. Noah gets a lot of high-quality guest posts that often get forwarded via email. Current list size is ~140,000.

Restart Med by Westin Childs

List size: ~5,500 emails. Open Rates: 22% - 29%.

A wellness blog hosted on MailChimp with a ~5,500 person email list.  

Open rates are healthy at between 22% - 29% depending on the subject. Can see below which emails seem to resonate the most according to open rate and click through rate.

Hey Kendra by Kendra Wright

List size: ~1,700 emails. Open Rates: 29% - 43%.

A screenshot from an email list of ~1,700 people.  It's funny that this is considered a "small" email list, but if you visualize a room full of 1,700 people who follow Kendra, that's actually a huge amount!  Often times these smaller lists that aren't totally monetized every damn email (which can get super annoying) can get great engagement rates like Kendra's.

Interesting side note: You can see a small list of 15 people she sends to (presumably a paid course of some sort) which gets incredibly high engagement (90% - 100% open rates and 50% - 100% clickthroughs).  Laser-targeted lists will always have higher engagements.  <-- (thanks Captain Obvious)!

The Hustle

List Size: ~81,000 Open Rates: 25% - 58%

The screenshot below is of different auto-responder campaigns which typically have a super-high open rate since people signup for something, then read the emails immediately.  

French Together

"These are broadcast emails.  You can see several messages with the same headlines. That’s because I send emails to three main segments: -Beginner French learners. -Intermediate and advanced learners. -Learners who didnt share their level yet."

KopywritingKourse.com by Neville Medhora

List size: ~47,500 emails. Open Rates: 22% - 31%.

Here’s a screenshot of some of my latest emails.  Since I haven’t been very consistent sending them sometimes the numbers swing quite a bit.

Aweber tells me the Copywriting Course has 15,000 members, although the end result gets sent out to between 11,900 and 12,100 subscribers.

You’ll notice the click-through rates vary WILDLY.
For example: The “How to remind someone through email” has a 0.7% click-through rate because there was nothing in the email to click.  So naturally no clicks (other than some random people clicking my signature).

However in a post about “How To Throw A Conference called HustleCon” there were TONS of juicy clickable links, so naturally the click-through rate was noticeably higher at 7.3%.

That post also laid out a blueprint for throwing a conference, so a lot of subscribers forwarded it to colleagues (which when they open also counts as an open).

This image is from September 2014 when the KopywritingKourse email list size was just a shade under 12,000 people, but it still gives you a good idea of the open rates (I'm now using InfusionSoft which doesn't have these easy-to-read reports):

I've pulled a bunch email broadcasts sent out to KopywritingKourse subscribers over the years and stuck them into a doc. Each entry is the email subject line with it's subsequent open rate percentage:

AppSumo.com

List Size: ~750,000+ Open Rates: ~13%

Here’s a sample of a SUPER LARGE email list that gets emailed about 3x per week.  There’s a host of problems when sending out tens of millions of emails per month, so these open rates can swing wildly (usually the only people sending out 10,000,000+ emails per month are spammers).

Notice the largest email blasts get within the ~13% Open range.

But then notice the super-targeted smaller email blasts Open super high at 50% - 70%.

When you consider that the "super targeted list" is still sending to over 55,000 people, it's quite amazing.