Benchmarks matter. But knowing the right benchmarks matters more, because most ecommerce brands are comparing themselves to the wrong numbers and drawing the wrong conclusions from what they see in their Klaviyo dashboard.

Here is a precise breakdown of what good actually looks like in 2025 and 2026, why the numbers differ by email type, and what to do when your metrics are falling short.

The Benchmarks You Actually Need to Know

Open Rates

For campaign emails sent to ecommerce lists, the average open rate across all verticals sits at around 38%. Health and wellness brands typically see 40 to 48%. Fashion and apparel brands tend to land between 33 and 37%. Beauty brands sit toward the higher end of that range.

If you are hitting 35% or above on campaigns, you are in a healthy position. If you are consistently below 25%, something is wrong. Either your subject lines are not compelling, your list has too many disengaged subscribers dragging your average down, or your deliverability is sending a portion of your emails to spam before they ever have the chance to be opened.

For automated flow emails, expect significantly higher numbers. Welcome series average 50 to 60% open rates. Abandoned cart flows average around 50%. Post-purchase emails tend to sit between 40 and 55%. These flows outperform campaigns on open rates because they are triggered by behaviour and therefore arrive at a moment when the subscriber is naturally predisposed to pay attention.

One important note on open rates in 2025 and 2026: Apple Mail Privacy Protection, which pre-loads email content for Apple Mail users, inflates open rate data by anywhere from 8 to 12 percentage points across most lists. This means your actual open rate is likely lower than what Klaviyo reports. Do not panic about this, but do not use open rate alone as your primary performance metric. Use it as a directional indicator, not an absolute measure.

Click-Through Rates

Click-through rate is the metric that actually tells you whether your emails are working. Anyone can write a subject line that gets opened. Getting someone to click requires relevance, a clear value proposition, and a call to action that earns the tap.

For campaign emails, a good click-through rate for ecommerce sits between 2.5 and 4.5%. Segmented campaigns consistently outperform unsegmented sends, typically landing between 4.2 and 6.8% click-through rate versus 1.8 to 2.4% for broad list sends. This is one of the clearest arguments for segmentation you will ever see in data form.

For automated flows, click rates are significantly higher because of the behavioural relevance factor. Abandoned cart flows average around 6 to 8% click rate. Welcome flows average 5 to 7%. Post-purchase emails that include a relevant cross-sell or product recommendation tend to land between 4 and 6%.

If you are seeing click rates below 1% on campaigns, you have either a relevance problem or a list health problem. Either you are sending to people who are not interested in what you are offering, or you are sending content that is not specific and valuable enough to earn a click.

What These Numbers Look Like at Retain Marketing

The benchmarks above are industry averages. Here is what we have achieved with the brands we work with.

Jubilee Scents, a UK fragrance brand, consistently achieved open rates between 35 and 50% across their campaign calendar, with certain plain-text emails hitting above 50%. Their click rates climbed above 2% across regular campaigns, with select emails hitting 7% and above on click rate, which is exceptional for campaign sends. These results came from consistent sending, smart segmentation, and a mix of email formats that kept the experience fresh for subscribers.

One of our clients hit 70% open rates on a newsletter campaign. That is not a flow email benefiting from behavioural timing. That is a campaign send, to a real list, achieving open rates that most agencies would claim are impossible for campaign emails. The reason: a subject line and sender name combination that had been built over months of consistent, trust-building communication with that audience.

These numbers are not accidents. They are the result of list hygiene, segmentation, sending cadence, and creative that respects the subscriber's attention rather than burning through it with promotions.

The Metric Most Brands Ignore That Matters Most: Revenue Per Recipient

Open rates and click rates tell you about engagement. Revenue per recipient tells you about performance.

Revenue per recipient is the total revenue attributed to an email divided by the number of recipients it was sent to. This is the number that connects your email activity directly to your bottom line, and it is the metric a specialist agency should be reporting on every single month.

For campaign emails, the Klaviyo 2026 benchmark puts average revenue per recipient at around $0.08 to $0.12. For automated flow emails, that number jumps to $0.15 to $0.35 on average, with top performers significantly higher. Abandoned cart flow emails specifically average around $3.65 per recipient, which is why they are the first flow any brand should build and the last flow any brand should neglect.

If your agency is reporting to you purely in open rates and click rates without connecting those metrics to revenue per recipient and total email-attributed revenue, ask them to change the reporting. Engagement metrics are inputs. Revenue is the output. The output is what you are paying for.

Why Your Numbers Might Be Lower Than the Benchmarks

There are four common reasons an ecommerce brand's email metrics sit below industry benchmarks, and each has a different fix.

List health. If you have been collecting emails for years without regularly suppressing disengaged subscribers, your active list is dragging your averages down. A list with 40,000 subscribers but only 12,000 who have engaged in the last 90 days is not a 40,000 subscriber list. It is a 12,000 subscriber list wrapped in 28,000 people who are hurting your deliverability and skewing your metrics. Regular list cleaning is not optional. It is foundational.

Deliverability. If your domain reputation is poor, a percentage of your emails are landing in spam regardless of how good the content is. The subscribers never see them. Your open rate and click rate suffer not because of the email but because of the infrastructure delivering it. We helped one client get from a low Klaviyo deliverability score to a score of 90, which immediately improved their inbox placement and their measurable engagement across every metric.

Segmentation. Sending the same email to your entire list is the single fastest way to suppress your click rates. A new subscriber who joined last week has completely different needs than a loyal customer who has purchased five times. When they receive the same email, one of them is almost always irrelevant. Relevance drives clicks. Irrelevance kills them.

Sending cadence. Brands that send too infrequently have warm-up problems where their domain is not sending enough volume to maintain a strong sender reputation. Brands that send too frequently without enough value in each send create fatigue and unsubscribes. The right cadence for most DTC ecommerce brands is one to two campaign sends per week to engaged segments, with flows running continuously in the background.

What to Actually Do If Your Metrics Are Below Benchmark

Start with a list audit. In Klaviyo, filter your list by engagement in the last 90 days. If fewer than 30% of your total list count has opened or clicked in that period, you have a list health problem that needs addressing before anything else.

Next, look at your subject line formula. The most reliable open rate drivers for ecommerce are curiosity gaps, specificity, and personal relevance. "New arrivals are here" is not specific. "The one we kept selling out of is back" is specific. The difference in open rate between those two subject lines on the same list can be 10 to 15 percentage points.

Then look at your click-to-open rate, which is the percentage of people who clicked after opening. If your open rate is healthy but your click-to-open rate is low, your email content is not delivering on the promise of the subject line. The subscriber opened, looked, and did not find a reason to click. That is a content and offer problem.

Finally, review your mobile rendering. More than 55% of ecommerce emails are opened on mobile devices. If your email looks good on desktop and broken on mobile, more than half your audience is seeing a version of your email that was not designed for them. Every Retain Marketing email is built mobile-first for exactly this reason.

The Bottom Line

A good open rate for ecommerce campaigns is 35% and above. A good click rate is 2.5 to 4.5% on campaigns, higher on flows. But these numbers are starting points, not ceilings.

The brands that treat benchmarks as a floor rather than a target, and that build their programme around genuine relevance rather than volume, consistently outperform the averages. And outperforming the averages on engagement translates directly into outperforming the averages on revenue.

If your metrics are sitting below these benchmarks and you are not sure why, a Klaviyo account audit will tell you within an hour exactly where the gaps are.

Book a 15-minute call with Retain Marketing and we will walk through your current metrics and tell you plainly what is holding them back.