Most merchants stop emailing a cold contact either too early or never, and the benchmark numbers show why both mistakes cost more than a clean sunset flow would.
Most merchants think a sunset flow is about deleting people, so they either avoid building one because it feels like throwing away subscribers, or they build one that fires too fast and cuts off contacts who would have come back. Neither instinct matches what the numbers actually reward. The gap between average senders and top performers is not about list size, it is about how cleanly a sender manages the contacts who stopped engaging, and that gap is measurable.
The average unsubscribe rate across senders is 0.46%. The top 10% of senders hold that number to 0.05%. That is not a small difference, it is roughly the difference between a list that slowly leaks trust every send and one that has already removed the people who were going to leave anyway. A sunset flow is the mechanism that gets a sender from the first number toward the second, because it moves disengaged contacts into a shorter, clearly labeled sequence instead of letting them sit in the regular send and eventually hit unsubscribe out of frustration.
European senders report an unsubscribe rate of 0.51%, close to the global average of 0.46%, which suggests the pattern holds across markets rather than being a quirk of one region. The numbers rest on Brevo’s published benchmark report as loaded on September 28, 2026, a document that aggregates sender-level metrics across its own platform.
Average open rate sits at 20.73%, and the top 10% of senders reach 44.02%. That spread is wide enough that a single global threshold for “this contact is dead” does not work well across accounts, because a sender averaging near the top of that range has a different baseline than one averaging near the bottom. What the spread does confirm is that engagement is unevenly distributed, and a sunset flow’s job is to separate the contacts dragging the average down from the ones holding it up.
Click-through rate follows a similar shape. The average is 2.27%, the top 10% reach 5.22%, and European senders report 2.29%, close to the global figure. A contact who opens consistently but rarely clicks is not the same risk as one who has stopped opening altogether, and a sunset flow can treat the two differently, for example giving the opener-only group one more attempt before the click-only group gets folded into a shorter re-engagement track.
| Metric | Average | Top 10% |
|---|---|---|
| Open rate | 20.73% | 44.02% |
| Click-through rate | 2.27% | 5.22% |
| Unsubscribe rate | 0.46% | 0.05% |
| Transactional open rate | 30.63% | — |
Transactional emails average a 30.63% open rate, almost ten points above the marketing average of 20.73%. That gap exists because transactional email arrives on the back of an action the recipient took, so there is already an expectation to open it. A sunset email framed like a transactional message, a plain notice that a preference or subscription status is about to change, can borrow some of that expectation without pretending to be a receipt. It will not match 30.63% on its own, but it explains why the tone of the final email in a sunset sequence matters more than the offer inside it.
European senders report a click-through rate of 2.29% against a global average of 2.27%, and an unsubscribe rate of 0.51% against a global average of 0.46%. Both regional figures sit within a few hundredths of a percentage point of the global numbers, which is a small enough gap to treat as noise rather than a real regional difference. That consistency across regions is useful on its own, because it means a sender does not need a separate sunset threshold for a European list versus any other list, at least at the level these benchmarks measure.
Build the sunset flow around your own open rate history rather than a borrowed cutoff, since the market range runs from 20.73% average to 44.02% at the top and your own baseline sits somewhere specific in that range. Aim the flow’s success metric at the unsubscribe rate, because moving from the 0.46% average toward the 0.05% top-tier figure is the clearest sign the sunset sequence is doing its job rather than just deferring the same unsubscribe by a few weeks.
The facts here do not name a specific day count, so any number you pick should come from your own open data rather than a rule someone else quotes. What the benchmarks do show is the size of the gap you are managing: average open rate is 20.73% and the top 10% of senders reach 44.02%, so a contact sitting well below your own average for a sustained stretch is the kind of signal a sunset flow is built to catch. Set the threshold against your account's own median open rate, not a borrowed number. Then let the flow run the same way every time a contact crosses it.
It should move you toward the top of the range rather than the middle of it. The average unsubscribe rate across senders is 0.46%, and the top 10% hold it to 0.05%, which is roughly the difference between letting dead contacts sit on your list and receive every send, versus pulling them into a shorter, more targeted flow before they get annoyed enough to unsubscribe. A sunset flow does not eliminate unsubscribes, it just moves the decision earlier and on your terms.
There is a real gap worth using. Transactional emails average a 30.63% open rate, well above the 20.73% marketing average, because they arrive when the recipient is expecting something specific. A sunset email framed as a status update, like confirming that a subscription or account preference is about to change, borrows some of that expectation. It will not hit 30.63% on its own, but it is a reasonable direction to test against a plain re-engagement pitch.
It is a secondary signal, useful mainly as a tiebreaker. The average click-through rate is 2.27%, with the top 10% reaching 5.22%, and European senders separately report 2.29%. A contact who opens but never clicks across several sends is a different case from one who never opens at all, and the sunset flow can treat them differently, for instance giving the opener-only group one extra attempt before removal since they are at least seeing the subject line.
No, and mixing the two is a common mistake. Transactional email averages a 30.63% open rate because it is triggered by an action the recipient took, like a purchase or a password reset, and sunsetting that kind of message would break the account relationship rather than clean a list. Sunset flows belong to marketing and promotional sends, the category that averages the 20.73% open rate and 0.46% unsubscribe rate this article is built around.