Email Marketing Benchmarks — April 2026

These are our April 2026 email marketing benchmarks — real data from 13 e-commerce brands and 7.5 million emails. The headline: two of those 13 brands sent campaigns and converted exactly zero of them. Their flows still produced revenue. The benchmark looks ugly, the diagnosis is the interesting part.

Across 13 e-commerce brands and 7.50 million emails in April, the portfolio generated $905,293 in email-attributed revenue — flat against March's $907K despite losing two brands and gaining one. Flows now drive 57.5% of email revenue, the highest share since we started publishing this report. The portfolio flow multiplier landed at 24.5x, down from 28.4x in March as the mix of brands shifted.

This month's Spotlight digs into the engagement-vs-attribution paradox — what it means when a brand has Excellent open rates and zero campaign conversions, and how to tell the difference between a tracking problem, a content problem, and a product-fit problem.

April at a Glance

Portfolio: 13 brands · 10 verticals · $905,293 total email revenue · 7.50M recipients

Revenue split: Campaigns $384,662 (42.5%) · Flows $520,631 (57.5%)

Roster change: Two brands rolled off the portfolio for April (an apparel brand and a beauty brand) and one new B2B/pro-tools brand joined. Net: 14 brands in March, 13 in April.

Scorecard

vs. March: Total email revenue is essentially flat ($907K → $905K) on a smaller brand count. Campaign revenue dropped from $439K to $385K (-12%), flow revenue rose from $468K to $521K (+11%). Total recipients fell from 7.97M to 7.50M as the two roll-off brands had broad campaign audiences. Campaign open rate held at 44.11% (March: 43.02%). Click rate ticked down from 0.54% to 0.50%, conversion rate held at 0.03%. RPR improved from $0.06 to $0.05 on campaigns — basically unchanged — while flow RPR slipped from $1.58 to $1.32 as the new B2B brand and the engagement-issue brands diluted the average. Email attribution rose from 28.0% to 28.2%.

vs. Industry Benchmarks

How does this portfolio compare to Klaviyo's published industry averages?

Campaign open rates remain 6+ points above industry. Click and conversion rates sit below industry averages — the same audience-breadth tradeoff we've documented in February and March. The flow open rate dip to 31.96% is real and worth flagging: two brands carry depressed flow open rates this month (one at 19%, one at 23%, both with elevated bounce rates) and they pull the weighted flow open rate down.

Email attribution edged up from 28.0% to 28.2%, holding above the ~27% industry benchmark for the second month running. Individual brand attribution ranges from 12.1% to 55.3%.

Klaviyo Benchmark Ratings (Campaigns)

Klaviyo benchmarks every account against similar-sized senders. Here's how our 13 brands stacked up on campaigns:

Flows distribution:

Same pattern as March, with sharper edges. Deliverability metrics (unsub, bounce, spam) skew Excellent or Good across both campaigns and flows. Performance metrics (click rate, placed order rate, RPR) skew Poor on the campaign side because of the audience-breadth math we explored in February's Spotlight on the click rate gap. RPR Good+ percentage on campaigns dropped from 36% in March to 31% as one of the new arrivals carries strong campaign RPR but the brands that left also did.

The Flow Multiplier

We track what we call the Flow Multiplier — flow RPR divided by campaign RPR. For every dollar a campaign generates per recipient, how many dollars does a flow generate?

Range: 1.5x to 65.5x for the 11 brands with non-zero campaign revenue. Median: 22.4x. Two brands — the Specialty Retail and Luxury brands — sent campaigns and converted exactly zero of them this month, producing an undefined multiplier; both still drove flow revenue. The Spotlight unpacks what's going on there.

Distribution: 5 brands at 30x or higher, 2 brands in the 10x–30x range, 3 brands in the 5x–10x range, 1 brand under 5x, and 2 brands with zero campaign conversions. The portfolio aggregate (24.5x) is heavily influenced by the largest Scale-tier brand's recipient volume.

The Benchmarks

Here are the full email marketing benchmarks for April, broken down by revenue, engagement, deliverability, and the flow vs. campaign split.

Revenue

Total email-attributed revenue across the portfolio: $905,293.

Campaigns drove $384,662 (42.5%). Flows drove $520,631 (57.5%). The flow share grew from 51.6% in March to 57.5% in April — the widest gap we've recorded. Flows generated $136K more than campaigns despite reaching 18x fewer people.

Campaigns went to 7.11M recipients. Flows went to 393K. Flows generated $1.32 per recipient vs. $0.05 for campaigns — a 24.5x portfolio-level gap, slightly narrower than March's 28x.

Revenue by Brand (Email-Attributed)

The largest Scale-tier brand is, again, the gravity well of the portfolio — $461K of $905K in email revenue (51%), 3.74M of 7.50M recipients (50%). Its weighting drives most of the aggregate rate calculations.

Notable individual brand stories this month: one Beauty brand grew email revenue 31% MoM ($72K → $94K) on a list expansion that lifted both campaign and flow revenue. The new B2B brand lands as the fourth-largest revenue driver in its first month. An Apparel brand recovered after a list pruning earlier in the year: campaign recipients fell from 179K to 58K but campaign RPR climbed 85% ($0.012 → $0.023). Two emerging-tier brands saw meaningful list-volume reductions month-over-month as routine hygiene cycles cleared inactives.

Engagement

Open Rate: Portfolio weighted average 43.47% (campaigns 44.11%, flows 31.96%). Range: 23.73%–55.69% for campaigns.

Campaign open rate ticked up slightly from March's 43.02%. Six brands rate Good or Excellent on campaign open rate. The flow open rate of 31.96% is the lower number worth flagging — it's pulled down by two brands with elevated flow bounce rates and entry-criteria issues. As always, Apple's Mail Privacy Protection inflates these numbers; the signal is downstream.

Click Rate: Portfolio weighted average 0.50% (campaigns). Range: 0.25%–2.21%. Klaviyo's industry average is 1.29%.

Five of 13 brands are rated Poor for campaign click rate. Two brands rate Excellent (a Food & Bev brand at 2.21% and an Apparel brand at 1.66%), both smaller-list senders where the audience math favors higher rates — the same pattern from February's Spotlight on the click rate gap.

Conversion Rate: Campaign average 0.03%. Flow average 0.50%. Flows convert at 18.5x the rate of campaigns — down from 25x in March, primarily because two brands recorded zero campaign conversions, dragging the campaign side toward zero on those rows but not enough to break the aggregate.

Month-over-month: Engagement signals softened modestly. Campaign click rate dipped from 0.54% to 0.50%, flow click rate from 3.15% to 2.08%, flow conversion rate from 0.68% to 0.50%. The flow-side declines reflect mix shift: the new B2B brand has Excellent flow RPR but Fair flow click rate; the brands that left in March had stronger flow conversion. Campaign performance is essentially stable at the existing-brand level.

Deliverability

Unsubscribe Rate: 0.14% portfolio average. Down from March's 0.15%. Nine brands rate Good or Excellent — 69% of the portfolio. Two brands rate Poor (a B2B services brand at 0.65% and an apparel brand at 0.47%). Healthy across the portfolio overall.

Bounce Rate: 0.41% portfolio average, basically unchanged from March (0.42%). Eight brands rate Good or Excellent for campaigns. Flow bounce rates remain the watch-list item: two brands rate Poor (one apparel at 2.25% flow bounce, one jewelry at 1.71%). The pattern from March holds — flow bounce issues are concentrated, not portfolio-wide.

Spam Complaint Rate: 0.008% portfolio average, effectively unchanged from March. Five brands rate Excellent for campaign spam rates. Only four rate Poor, and most of those have elevated spam at low absolute thresholds (0.0002–0.0005%, well below the 0.1% ISP threshold).

Deliverability remains the strongest section of the portfolio. The list hygiene work continues to show in stable bounce and unsub metrics across roster changes.

Flows vs. Campaigns

The core comparison:

April is the third consecutive month flows outpaced campaigns in total revenue. The dollar gap widened from $29K in March to $136K in April. The efficiency gap narrowed from 28x to 24.5x, but that's a mix-shift artifact — remove the two zero-campaign-conversion brands and the multiplier looks much more like March.

Spotlight: Excellent Open Rates, Zero Conversions — The Engagement-Attribution Paradox

Two brands in the portfolio sent campaigns this month that nobody bought from. Not metaphorically — literally zero placed orders attributed to campaigns. Yet one of them (the Specialty Retail brand) had a 53.76% campaign open rate and rates Excellent on Klaviyo's open rate benchmark. The other (the Luxury brand) had a 55.69% open rate, also Good. People are opening. Nobody is buying.

This is the engagement-vs-attribution paradox, and it's the most diagnostically useful pattern in the data this month. Most brands never see it because most brands have enough volume that something always converts. When you have a small list, low send volume, and high-AOV products, you can run a clean campaign and produce zero attributed orders — not because the campaign was bad, but because of how the math interacts with attribution windows.

Three Explanations for the Same Pattern

When a brand shows high open rates and zero campaign conversions, there are three distinct explanations. They look identical in the dashboard. The fix for each is completely different.

1. The attribution-window problem. Klaviyo's default attribution window is 5 days for clicks and 5 days for opens. If your customer opens an email Monday, browses Wednesday, and buys Friday after seeing a retargeting ad — that order may not get attributed to the email. For high-AOV considered purchases (jewelry, premium goods), the buying journey often exceeds the attribution window. The campaign did its job — it kept the brand top-of-mind — but the attribution model doesn't see it. Diagnostic: cross-reference total store revenue against email-attributed revenue. If store revenue is healthy but campaign attribution is near zero, attribution windows are likely the issue, not the content.

2. The audience-product mismatch. The list grew through a discount-driven popup offer, but the brand sells premium product. The list opens because the subject lines are good, but the people on the list aren't buyers. They subscribed for the 15% off code and never came back. This shows up as good engagement but anemic conversion across both campaigns and flows over multiple months. Diagnostic: look at flow performance for the same audience. If flows also convert poorly, the issue is the list, not the campaign.

3. The content-offer mismatch. Strong subject lines, weak in-email offers. People open because the hook works, then leave because the email asks for an action that isn't compelling enough. This is the most common variant for established brands. Diagnostic: click-to-conversion ratio. If clicks are happening but converting at near-zero rates, the post-click experience is broken — not the email. If clicks are also near zero, the email isn't making a strong enough case.

How to Read These Two Specific Brands

For the Specialty Retail brand: total store revenue dropped from $128K in March to $3K in April. That's not an attribution issue — that's a demand issue. Email isn't failing; the business is in a soft month. The 53.76% open rate tells you the list is engaged. The zero campaign conversions tell you nobody is buying anywhere right now, including from emails. The fix isn't the email program; it's the merchandising and the offer.

For the Luxury brand: total store revenue dropped from $36K in March to $18K in April. The campaign open rate held at 55.69% (Good) and click rate held at 1.52% (Good). Click-to-conversion is the broken link — people are clicking and not buying. For high-AOV considered purchases, this is most often the attribution-window issue (the consideration cycle is longer than 5 days) compounded by a tighter discretionary-spend environment. The flow program still converted some buyers ($2,746 in flow revenue from 2,222 recipients), suggesting behavior-triggered emails are still capturing intent.

Same pattern in the data — zero campaign conversions, strong open rates — two completely different diagnoses. The Specialty Retail brand: a business issue showing up in the email metrics. The Luxury brand: an attribution issue showing up in the email metrics. Treat them the same way and you'll fix neither.

The Lesson for Benchmarking

Klaviyo's benchmark UI rates the Specialty Retail brand's campaign placed-order rate "Excellent" (1st percentile, value 0.0) because the percentile system can't handle a zero numerator gracefully. The dashboard tells you to be proud of a metric that means nothing happened. This is why we read benchmarks against revenue context, not in isolation.

The brands that actually need attention this month aren't the ones with the worst rates — they're the ones where the rates and the revenue tell different stories. Both of these brands need a conversation about offer strategy, attribution-window settings, and product/list fit. Neither needs a content overhaul.

Want to know whether your brand has a content problem, an attribution problem, or a list problem? We diagnose this for every new client in their first week. Get in touch and we'll show you which one you have.

What We'd Do About It

Based on April's data, here are the five things we'd prioritize:

1. Diagnose the zero-conversion brands separately. The Specialty Retail brand and the Luxury brand both posted zero campaign conversions but for different underlying reasons. The first step is widening the Klaviyo attribution window from 5 days to 10 days for the Luxury brand and re-running the report — if attributed campaign revenue appears, the fix is operational, not creative. For the Specialty Retail brand, the conversation is about merchandising and demand, not email content; pull store revenue trends and align the campaign calendar to product moments rather than promotional pushes.

2. Capitalize on Beauty's breakout. Email revenue grew 31% MoM ($72K → $94K) and the brand is now the second-largest revenue driver in the portfolio. Campaign RPR climbed even as recipients grew — the rare combination that signals genuine list-quality improvement, not just larger sends. Lock in the cadence and content patterns that drove April's lift, and use the next 30 days to test segmentation refinements at the top of the funnel.

3. Address flow open rate softness on two specific brands. The portfolio flow open rate dropped to 31.96%, well below March's 39.40%. Two brands are responsible: one with a 19.17% flow open rate (the Home Goods brand) and another with 22.53% (the Specialty Retail brand). On the Home Goods brand, this is almost certainly a flow-entry-criteria issue — large flow recipient counts (140K) suggest a re-engagement or back-in-stock flow is firing into a stale segment. Audit the flow recipients list and tighten entry criteria. On the Specialty Retail brand, 22.53% open rate alongside 53.76% campaign open rate means the flow audience is meaningfully different from the campaign audience — likely older, less engaged subscribers who never re-converted. Sunset and re-permission.

4. Onboard the new B2B brand into the standard playbook. The brand landed in April as the fourth-largest revenue driver with strong flow RPR ($5.04, Excellent) and a healthy flow multiplier (34.6x). Flow placed-order rate already rates Good (51st percentile). The opportunity is on the campaign side: campaign RPR of $0.15 rates Excellent for the audience size, but click rate is only Fair. Add A/B testing on subject lines and hero blocks; the audience is responsive (Good open rate), so the lift is achievable.

5. Investigate elevated unsub rates on a B2B and an Apparel brand. Two brands rate Poor on campaign unsubscribe rate — a small B2B brand at 0.65% (22nd percentile) and an Apparel brand at 0.47% (14th percentile). Both are well below the danger threshold but signal that the content-to-audience match is weakening. For the B2B brand, send frequency may be too high relative to the small list size (12K recipients). For the Apparel brand, the recent list pruning may have left a more sensitive audience that needs gentler send patterns. Reduce frequency for one cycle and watch the rate.

How to Read This Report

This report aggregates anonymized data from 13 e-commerce brands managed by our agency. Brands are identified by vertical and revenue tier:

• Emerging: <$25K/mo in email-attributed revenue
• Growth: $25K–$100K/mo
• Scale: $100K+/mo

Klaviyo Benchmark Ratings compare each brand's metrics against Klaviyo's industry percentiles:

• Excellent = 75th–100th percentile
• Good = 50th–75th percentile
• Fair = 25th–50th percentile
• Poor = 0–25th percentile

Weighted averages weight each brand by recipient count, so larger senders have proportionally more influence on portfolio metrics. The largest Scale-tier brand — with 3.74M of the portfolio's 7.50M recipients — carries the most weight.

Revenue figures are Klaviyo-attributed (last-touch email attribution with Klaviyo's default attribution window). These numbers represent revenue that Klaviyo attributes to email, not total store revenue.

This is the fourth edition of our monthly email marketing benchmarks report. Historical comparisons reference March 2026 data, February 2026 data, and January 2026 data.

Frequently Asked Questions

Why did the portfolio drop from 14 brands to 13?

Two brands rolled off the portfolio for April (a Food & Bev brand and an Apparel brand) and one new brand — a B2B brand — joined. April reflects this composition. The flat overall revenue ($907K → $905K) on a smaller brand count is itself a story: the remaining brands collectively grew enough to offset the missing two.

What does an "infinite" flow multiplier mean?

Flow multiplier is flow RPR divided by campaign RPR. When a brand sends campaigns and converts zero of them, campaign RPR is $0 and the multiplier is mathematically undefined (division by zero). Two brands hit this in April — the Specialty Retail brand and the Luxury brand. We exclude them from the multiplier chart and treat them separately in the Spotlight diagnosis.

Why is click rate so far below the industry average?

Audience size. Click rate has a mathematical relationship with how many people you send to — the larger the audience, the lower the rate. Klaviyo's industry average (1.29%) is computed across senders of all sizes; our portfolio is weighted toward larger lists where rate metrics naturally compress. Total clicks and total revenue are the metrics that actually matter at scale — we explored this fully in February's Spotlight.

Are the rate metrics seasonally adjusted?

No. We publish monthly raw figures so month-over-month comparisons are transparent. April is a 30-day month with no major retail holiday and no Easter (which fell in March this year). Rate metrics tend to compress slightly in April relative to March because campaign volumes thin and flows carry a heavier share of revenue.

How does this benchmark compare to my own brand?

Compare your own metrics against the table in this post and against your Klaviyo benchmark percentiles. The most useful single comparison is your flow multiplier — flow RPR divided by campaign RPR. The April portfolio range was 1.5x to 65.5x, with a median of 22.4x. If you want a deeper read tailored to your brand, get in touch.