Email open rates in live events: the real numbers from festivals and nightclubs
Real email marketing benchmarks for live events: 33.9% open rate for festivals, 31.9% for clubs and conversion in 6.6 days. Data from 332 real campaigns.
Most email marketing reports you will read this year mix fashion ecommerce, B2B software and recipe newsletters into the same table. Their closest category to what you do is called “Events”, and it lumps a dentists’ conference in with a 40,000-capacity festival.
This guide does not do that. It is data from a single industry — live events — split into the two realities that genuinely behave differently: festivals and nightlife venues.
Universe analysed: 2.3 million emails sent during the 2025/26 season (September 2025 to August 2026), the most recent closed season. These are the figures to use as your reference when planning 2026/27.
How to read these numbers before comparing yourself
Three methodological decisions that change the reading:
Medians, not averages. A single mass campaign can move an average by several points. The median tells you what happens to the typical campaign, which is what you want to know if you are asking whether you are doing well.
Opens over delivered emails. This is the basis MailerLite, Acumbamail and the rest use, so these figures are comparable with theirs. In our case it barely matters which basis you pick: median delivery rate is 99.8%, so there is almost no difference between calculating over sent or over delivered.
We give the range, not just the centre. We publish the 25th and 75th percentile alongside the median. If you only look at the middle number you will not know whether you are within normal or an outlier — and in this industry the spread is enormous.
Excluded from the analysis: transactional campaigns (purchase confirmations, tickets, access reminders), demo and internal test accounts, and any campaign under 500 sends.
Festivals
1.4 million emails · 384,315 opens
| Metric | P25 | Median | P75 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Open rate | 18.5% | 35.6% | 52.8% |
| CTR (over delivered) | — | 0.58% | — |
| CTOR (clicks over opens) | — | 2.07% | — |
| Bounce rate | — | 0.39% | — |
| Delivery rate | — | 99.8% | — |
A 35.6% median open rate is a good number in any industry, and here it explains itself: a festival’s list is made of people who paid for a ticket. The bond with the brand exists before the email ever arrives.
What stands out is the range. Between the 25th and 75th percentile there are 34 points of difference. That is not statistical noise: it is the distance between a festival that talks to its audience all year and one that reappears in January when sales open. Both sell tickets; only one has a list that is waiting for them.
The 0.58% CTR is low, and that is normal for festivals. Most campaigns in a season are not asking anyone to buy: they announce the line-up, confirm artists, remind people of dates. Clicks arrive concentrated in the few campaigns that do open sales.
Nightlife venues
Over 500,000 emails · 162,216 opens
| Metric | P25 | Median | P75 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Open rate | 10.1% | 16.2% | 44.2% |
| CTR (over delivered) | — | 0.81% | — |
| CTOR (clicks over opens) | — | 3.96% | — |
| Bounce rate | — | 0.79% | — |
| Delivery rate | — | 99.9% | — |
A 16.2% open rate. Less than half a festival’s, and well below any generalist benchmark you have seen.
Before drawing conclusions, look at the next row.
The figure that changes the conversation: low opens, high CTOR
Putting the two verticals side by side is where this guide stops resembling the others:
| Festivals | Nightlife | |
|---|---|---|
| Open rate | 35.6% | 16.2% |
| CTOR | 2.07% | 3.96% |
Nightlife opens at less than half the rate, but converts almost twice as well per open.
The explanation lies in how each list is built. A club captures emails at the door, on the way in, from people who did not go there to subscribe to anything. That list is large and it is cold: plenty of addresses that never intended to receive communications. It depresses open rate structurally, and no subject line fixes that.
But the person who does open is doing something very specific: deciding their weekend. The club email lands on Thursday, says what is on for Saturday, and the recipient is two days from the decision. Purchase intent at the moment of opening is extremely high.
In a festival the opposite happens: many people open because they recognise the brand and want to see the line-up, with no intention of buying that day.
The practical consequence is direct: if you run a club optimising for open rate, you are optimising the wrong metric. Scrubbing the list to lift opens will remove precisely the people who buy at the margin. Look at CTOR and revenue per send instead.
ROI and ROAS: what the channel returns
This is where event email separates itself from everything else. These figures cover only campaigns with attributed conversion during the season.
| Festivals | Nightlife | |
|---|---|---|
| ROAS (median) | 57.4x | 24.8x |
| ROAS (75th percentile) | 134.8x | 47.6x |
| ROI (median) | 5,639% | 2,380% |
| Cost per click | €0.19 | €0.18 |
A 57x ROAS sounds unreal until you look at the two variables behind it. The variable cost of an email is measured in cents; the revenue from a ticket is not. With that ratio between what the send costs and what you are selling is worth, the multiple comes out that way.
It is worth stating what that ROAS does and does not measure, because that is the difference between a useful figure and a headline: it is attributed revenue over channel cost. It does not include the salary of whoever designs the campaign, the creative production, or the tool. It is the same basis on which the email industry reports its ROI, and it is why email figures always sit an order of magnitude above paid media, where media cost is the bulk of the spend.
With that caveat in place, the business reading holds: the channel pays for itself many times over, and the bottleneck is never the cost of sending. It is having the database, and having something to say.
Why clubs earn less per email and it still adds up
The ROAS gap between the two verticals — 57.4x against 24.8x — does not come from clubs doing it worse. It comes from what each one sells.
Clubs sell cheap entries, guest lists and drinks. Festivals sell passes. With a virtually identical cost per click (€0.19 and €0.18), what separates their ROAS is almost entirely the value of what they sell.
And the club converts a comparable order volume with half the campaigns of a festival. That says the exact opposite of what its open rate suggests: the weekly club email is a conversion machine with a small order. Its growth lever is not opening more, it is raising the value of each order.
How to use this without fooling yourself
A diagnostic order that works:
- Start with CTOR, not open rate. It tells you whether the problem is the list or the offer. CTOR in range and low opens: list or subject line problem. CTOR low too: offer or timing problem.
- Compare against your vertical, not the average. If you run a club and compare yourself to the festivals’ 35.6% — or worse, to the 43% a generalist platform publishes — you will conclude you are doing terribly when you are probably in range.
- Look at where you fall in the range, not whether you beat the median. With 34 points between P25 and P75 in festivals, sitting on the median does not mean doing well: it means sitting in the middle of a very uneven group.
- If your ROAS is single-digit, the problem is almost never email. At these costs per click, a low ROAS points to attribution (you are not measuring the sale) or to the value of what you sell, not to the channel.
Methodology
Source. Email campaigns sent through the Nevent platform by live event promoters. First-party data, not a survey and not third-party data.
Period. Full 2025/26 season: 1 September 2025 to 31 August 2026.
Universe. 2.3 million emails in the total analysed, of which 1.9 million correspond to the two verticals broken out in this guide (festivals and nightlife). The remainder are cultural promoters, sporting events and conferences, included in the total but not published separately for lack of sufficient sample size.
Inclusion criteria. Executed, non-transactional campaigns with 500 or more sends and at least one delivered email. Demo and internal test accounts excluded.
Calculation. Open rate = unique opens over delivered emails. CTR = unique clicks over delivered. CTOR = unique clicks over unique opens. Bounce over sent. All figures are medians per campaign, with 25th and 75th percentiles where indicated.
Attribution. Revenue and conversions come from Nevent’s attribution model, which distributes purchase value across prior touchpoints. ROAS = attributed revenue over variable channel cost. ROI = (attributed revenue − variable cost) / variable cost.
Anonymity. No individual client data is identifiable. All figures are aggregates by vertical.
Updates. This guide is revised at the close of each season. The next edition will cover the 2026/27 season.
