Email Marketing Benchmarks — February 2026

These are our February 2026 email marketing benchmarks — real data from 11 e-commerce brands and 7.5 million emails. Click rate is the metric everyone watches. It's also the one that lies to you the most.

Across 11 e-commerce brands and 7.5 million emails in February, our portfolio-wide campaign click rate was 0.46%. Klaviyo rates that "Poor" for most of our brands. Meanwhile, those same brands generated $619,257 in email-attributed revenue — 25% of total store revenue.

Click rate says we're failing. Revenue says we're not. This month's Spotlight digs into why the click rate gap exists, why we don't care, and when you actually should.

February at a Glance

Portfolio: 11 brands · 7 verticals · $619,257 total email revenue · 7.55M recipients

Revenue split: Campaigns $303,894 (49.1%) · Flows $315,363 (50.9%)

Scorecard

vs. January: Revenue down 19.9% ($773K → $619K). February is a shorter month with no holiday tail, so some decline is expected. Portfolio grew from 7.1M to 7.55M recipients as a new food & bev brand joined and several brands expanded their sending audiences. Rate metrics held steady — open rates, click rates, and conversion rates are consistent with January, confirming the revenue decline is volume- and calendar-driven, not performance-driven.

vs. Industry Benchmarks

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

Campaign open rates remain well above industry average. Click rates and conversion rates are below — the same pattern as January, and the same reason: we send broad. More on this in the Spotlight.

Email attribution dipped from 33.7% to 25.0%. This is partly a composition effect — the addition of a new Food & Bev (Emerging) brand (high recipient count, low RPR) pulls the weighted average down. Individual brand attribution ranges from 5.5% to 68.5%.

Klaviyo Benchmark Ratings (Campaigns)

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

The pattern: deliverability metrics (unsub, bounce, spam) skew Excellent/Good. Performance metrics (click, conversion, RPR) skew Poor. This is the tradeoff of sending to broader audiences — rates look worse, but total revenue is higher.

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: 1.3x to 111x. Median: 20.7x. Once again, every brand, every vertical. One jewelry brand is excluded from this table — campaigns drove $0 in conversions in February (all revenue came through flows), making the multiplier infinite.

The Food & Bev (Scale) brand's multiplier jumped from 75x in January to 111x. Flow revenue held steady while campaign RPR dropped slightly, widening the gap.

The Benchmarks

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

Revenue

Total email-attributed revenue across the portfolio: $619,257.

Campaigns drove $303,894 (49.1%). Flows drove $315,363 (50.9%). Flows edged out campaigns in total revenue for the first time — by a slim margin, but with 21x fewer recipients.

Campaigns went to 7.22M recipients. Flows went to 336K. Flows generated $0.94 per recipient vs. $0.04 for campaigns — a 22x gap at the portfolio level, up from 18x in January.

Revenue by Brand (Email-Attributed)

AOV range: Campaigns $37–$448. Flows $40–$2,542. The $2,542 flow AOV is a luxury jewelry brand — one high-value sale through a flow skews the number. Excluding that outlier, flow AOV ranges $40–$566. Flows consistently drive higher AOV across the portfolio.

Engagement

Open Rate: Portfolio weighted average 47.40% (campaigns 47.85%, flows 37.59%). Range: 29.59%–57.00% for campaigns.

Consistent with January (49.02%). The slight decline is within normal variation. Six brands rate Good or Excellent for campaign open rates. Open rates remain our strongest benchmark metric. As always, Apple's Mail Privacy Protection inflates these numbers — the signal is downstream.

Click Rate: Portfolio weighted average 0.46% (campaigns). Range: 0.24%–2.44%. Klaviyo's industry average is 1.29%.

Six of 11 brands are rated Poor for campaign click rate. One brand (an apparel brand with a smaller, highly engaged list) rates Excellent. This is the metric where our portfolio looks weakest against benchmarks — and where the gap is most misleading. See the Spotlight section.

Conversion Rate: Campaign average 0.03%. Flow average 0.60%. Flows convert at 19x the rate of campaigns — consistent with January's 18x gap.

Month-over-month: Engagement metrics are remarkably stable. Open rates moved from 49.02% to 47.40% — a 1.62 percentage point decline that falls within normal seasonal variation. Click rates held at 0.46% (vs. 0.47% in January). Conversion rates are flat. This stability is significant because the portfolio added a new brand and expanded sending audiences. Growing the recipient base by 6% without degrading engagement signals tells you the list quality and segmentation strategy are sound.

Deliverability

Unsubscribe Rate: 0.18% portfolio average. Down slightly from January's 0.20%. Four brands rate Excellent, two rate Good. Healthy across the board.

Bounce Rate: 0.35% portfolio average. Improved significantly from January's 1.06% — the list migration that inflated January's numbers is resolved. Seven brands rate Good or Excellent.

Spam Complaint Rate: 0.009% portfolio average. Well below the 0.1% threshold that causes problems with ISPs. Three brands rate Excellent for campaigns. Steady from January.

Deliverability is the strongest section of the portfolio. Spam rates are near-zero, unsub rates are manageable, and the bounce rate improvement from January shows the list hygiene work is paying off.

Flows vs. Campaigns

The core comparison:

February is the first month where flows outpaced campaigns in total revenue — $315K vs. $304K. The gap is narrow, but the efficiency gap continues to widen: 22x RPR difference, up from 18x in January.

Spotlight: The Click Rate Gap — Why It's the Universal Weak Spot (and Why We Don't Care)

Click rate is the red number on most of our brands' Klaviyo benchmark reports. Six of 11 brands rate "Poor" for campaign click rate. The portfolio average is 0.46% against an industry average of 1.29%.

If click rate were the scoreboard, we'd be losing. It's not.

The Audience Size Effect

Click rate has a mathematical relationship with audience size that most people don't think about.

Consider two brands. Brand A sends to 10,000 engaged subscribers. Brand B sends to 1,000,000 people. Both generate 500 clicks. Brand A has a 5% click rate. Brand B has a 0.05% click rate. Same number of clicks. Same number of people taking action. Wildly different rates.

Our Scale food & bev brand sends campaigns to 2.95 million recipients. Their click rate is 0.43%. In absolute terms, that's 12,588 unique clicks — more clicks than most brands' entire email list. Klaviyo rates it "Poor" because the denominator is enormous.

Our Food & Bev (Growth) brand sends to 11,779 campaign recipients. Their click rate is 1.84% — rated "Good." That's 217 unique clicks.

Which brand is performing better? Click rate says the small brand. Absolute engagement says the Scale brand by 58x.

The Revenue Test

Here's the question that matters: if you could wave a wand and double your click rate, would revenue double?

No. Because the way you double click rate is by cutting your audience in half — sending only to the most engaged segment. Click rate goes up. Recipients go down. And unless every person you cut was generating zero revenue, total revenue goes down too.

We've tested this across multiple brands. Tighter segments produce higher rates and lower total revenue. Broader sends produce lower rates and higher total revenue. The math is simple: a 0.03% conversion rate on 2.95 million recipients generates more orders than a 0.10% conversion rate on 50,000 recipients.

The Brands Where Click Rate Does Matter

Click rate isn't useless. It's useful in specific contexts:

Trend analysis within the same audience. If you're sending to the same segment every week and click rate drops from 0.5% to 0.3% over three months, something is wrong — your content is getting stale, your subject lines are losing pull, or your offers are losing relevance. That's a real signal.

Flow performance. Flow click rates range from 1.53% to 10.56% across the portfolio. Because flow audiences are behavior-triggered (they took a specific action), the audience size is naturally constrained and click rate becomes a more meaningful comparison point. One apparel brand's 10.56% flow click rate vs. another food & bev brand's 1.79% tells you something real about the quality of those flow sequences.

Competitive context within similar audience sizes. If two brands both send to ~100K recipients and one has a 1.3% click rate while the other has 0.5%, the gap probably reflects content quality, not audience math. An apparel brand (1.31%, 119K recipients) vs. a beauty brand (0.24%, 1.2M recipients) — those aren't comparable. That same apparel brand (1.31%, 119K) vs. a spirits brand (0.46%, 119K) — that gap might be worth investigating.

What We Watch Instead

Revenue per recipient (RPR). This is the metric that combines click rate, conversion rate, and AOV into one number. It tells you how much money each email generates. Campaign RPR ranges from $0.007 to $0.447. That range tells you more about performance than click rate ever could.

Total revenue per send. How much did today's campaign generate? If the answer is $15,000, it doesn't matter whether click rate was 0.4% or 1.4%.

Conversion rate trends. Campaign conversion rates range from 0.011% to 0.171%. This metric is less inflated by audience size than click rate because it captures the full funnel — open, click, and purchase.

Flow multiplier. How much harder are flows working than campaigns? A 22x multiplier means flows are generating 22 dollars for every dollar campaigns generate per recipient. That tells you where to invest your optimization time.

The Uncomfortable Truth

Most email benchmarking is designed for marketers who send to small lists. Klaviyo's percentile system compares you against every brand in your vertical — including the one sending to 5,000 people with a 3% click rate. If you're sending to 500,000+, you'll almost always rate "Poor" or "Fair" for click rate. That doesn't mean you're doing poor work. It means the benchmark doesn't account for scale.

The question isn't "how do we get click rate above 1.29%?" The question is "are we generating more revenue by sending broader?" Across this portfolio, the answer is consistently yes.

If your click rate is low and your revenue is growing — keep going. If your click rate is low and your revenue is shrinking — then you have a content problem, not a click rate problem. Fix the content, not the audience size.

Want to know where your brand sits against these benchmarks? We run this analysis for every new client in their first week. Get in touch and we'll show you where the gaps are.

What We'd Do About It

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

1. Investigate the click-to-conversion gap in flows. Flow click rates average 2.50%, but conversion rates average 0.60%. That's a 4:1 click-to-conversion ratio — meaning 3 out of 4 people who click a flow email don't buy. For comparison, campaigns have a 15:1 ratio, but that's expected with broadcast sends. In flows — where intent is high — a 4:1 ratio suggests the landing pages, product pages, or checkout flow may be leaking conversions. The diagnostic path here is straightforward: pull Klaviyo's flow analytics, identify the flows with the highest click volume but lowest conversion rate, then walk through the post-click experience. Slow-loading product pages, out-of-stock items, or checkout friction are the usual culprits. This is the highest-leverage optimization area in the portfolio right now.

2. Double down on flow optimization. Flows outpaced campaigns in total revenue for the first time. The 22x RPR gap is widening. Every hour spent improving a high-traffic flow will continue to outperform an hour spent on the next campaign. Priority flows to optimize: abandoned cart, browse abandonment, and welcome series — in that order.

3. Address the two outlier deliverability brands. One apparel brand has the highest spam complaint rate in the portfolio (0.053% campaigns, 0.103% flows). A food & bev brand has elevated flow bounce rates (1.60%). Both are well below danger thresholds, but they're the brands most likely to develop deliverability problems if left unchecked. Run consent-based re-engagement campaigns and tighten list hygiene.

4. Capitalize on our highest-engagement brand's quality. Highest campaign click rate (1.31%), highest flow conversion rate (1.319%), Excellent Klaviyo ratings for engagement — but only 5.5% email attribution. This apparel brand has strong engagement signals but low revenue capture. The gap suggests either low email frequency, insufficient flow coverage, or pricing/merchandising issues on the site. Worth a deep audit.

5. Build out the jewelry brand's campaign program. Campaigns generated $0 in conversions in February — all $7,625 came from flows. This is a high-AOV brand ($2,542 flow AOV) with an engaged list (56.87% campaign open rate, Good benchmark). The flow program is working; the campaign program needs content that drives purchase intent for a considered purchase. Product storytelling, social proof, and exclusivity framing over promotional discounts. For high-AOV categories like jewelry, campaigns need to build desire over multiple touchpoints rather than pushing for an immediate click-to-buy. A series approach — behind-the-scenes craftsmanship content, followed by a customer spotlight, followed by a limited-availability announcement — typically outperforms single promotional sends.

How to Read This Report

This report aggregates anonymized data from 11 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 Food & Bev (Scale) brand — with 2.98M of the portfolio's 7.55M recipients — has the most influence on aggregate rates.

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 second edition of our monthly email marketing benchmarks report. Historical comparisons reference January 2026 data. March's Spotlight: AOV by Vertical — what drives higher-value orders.