E-Commerce Email Marketing Benchmarks — January 2026

Flows generated 2–75x more revenue per recipient than campaigns across every single brand we manage.

Not most brands. Every brand. No exceptions.

We run email for e-commerce brands across food & bev, apparel, health & wellness, beauty, jewelry, general retail, and spirits. In January 2026, those brands sent 7.1M emails and generated $773,331 in email-attributed revenue.

Every month, we pull the data, anonymize it, and publish the benchmarks. This is the first edition.

Below you'll find open rates, click rates, conversion rates, revenue per recipient, AOV, and deliverability metrics — broken out by campaigns vs. flows, compared against Klaviyo's industry benchmarks, and analyzed by vertical. If you run email for an e-commerce brand and want to know how your numbers stack up, this is the report.

January at a Glance

Portfolio: Multiple brands · 7 verticals · $773,331 total email revenue · 7.1M recipients

Revenue split: Campaigns $386,466 (50%) · Flows $386,865 (50%)

Scorecard

vs. Prior Month: Revenue down 26.2%. Expected — January is historically the slowest month after the holiday spike. Every brand in the portfolio saw a December-to-January decline. The numbers that matter are the rate metrics, and those held steady or improved.

vs. Industry Benchmarks

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

Campaign open rates are well above industry average. Click rates and conversion rates are below. That looks bad on paper — until you understand why.

We deliberately send campaigns to broader audiences than most brands. A tighter segment would push click rate above 1.29% tomorrow. It would also reduce total revenue. We optimize for revenue, not rate metrics. More on this in the Engagement section.

The bottom row is the one that matters most. Email drives 33.7% of total store revenue across the portfolio vs. the industry average of roughly 27%. Individual brands range from 12% to 70% — the larger, more mature programs consistently outperform. Lower click rates, higher revenue share. That's the tradeoff we're making.

Klaviyo Benchmark Ratings (Campaigns)

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

The pattern: open rates are solid across the portfolio. Click rates and conversion rates skew lower — a deliberate tradeoff. We send to broader audiences to maximize total revenue, which dilutes rate metrics. More on this in the Engagement section.

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: 2x to 75x. Median: 18x. Every brand, every vertical, every tier. We'll come back to this in the Spotlight section.

The Benchmarks

Revenue

Total email-attributed revenue across the portfolio: $773,331.

Campaigns drove $386,466 (50%). Flows drove $386,865 (50%). That sounds even. It's not.

Campaigns went to 6.73M recipients. Flows went to 371K. That means flows generated $1.04 per recipient vs. $0.06 for campaigns. An 18x difference at the portfolio level.

AOV range: Campaigns $38–$5,579. Flows $39–$3,263. The high end is a luxury jewelry brand with $4,000+ AOV — not representative of the typical e-commerce brand. Excluding that outlier, campaigns range $38–$595 and flows $39–$647. Flows are consistently higher, which makes sense — someone who triggered a flow (abandoned cart, browse, checkout) tends to have higher purchase intent and larger carts.

Engagement

Open Rate: Portfolio weighted average 49.02%. Range: 21.14%–72.30%.

Klaviyo rates the majority of our brands Good or Excellent for campaign open rates. This is our strongest benchmark metric. Open rates are worth monitoring but don't read too much into them — Apple's Mail Privacy Protection inflates these numbers, and the real signal is downstream.

Click Rate: Portfolio weighted average 0.53% (campaigns). Range: 0.27%–3.58%. Klaviyo's industry average is 1.29%.

Klaviyo's benchmarks rate most of our brands below average for campaign click rates. That looks like a problem. We don't think it is.

Here's why: we deliberately send to broader audiences than most brands. Brands with smaller lists naturally have higher click rates. A brand sending to 1.07M people will always have a lower click rate than one sending to 50K — even with the same quality of work. The difference is audience size, not email quality.

We could send to smaller, more engaged segments and click rate would go up immediately. But total revenue would go down. We've tested this. Broader sends generate more total conversions even though the rate is lower — because the denominator (recipients) grows faster than the numerator (clicks) shrinks.

Click rate is a directional metric, not a goal. If your click rate improves but revenue drops, you didn't win. If click rate drops but revenue grows, you did. We watch it for trends (is it declining month over month for the same audience?) but we don't optimize for it in isolation.

Conversion Rate: Campaign average 0.03%. Flow average 0.56%. Flows convert at 18x the rate of campaigns.

This isn't surprising. Campaigns broadcast to a list. Flows fire when someone does something — adds to cart, starts checkout, browses a product page. The intent is already there. The email just has to not screw it up.

Deliverability

Unsubscribe Rate: 0.20% portfolio average. Healthy.

Bounce Rate: 1.06% portfolio average. A few brands are elevated here — our Scale food & bev brand ran a large list migration in January that inflated bounce numbers temporarily. We're monitoring this and running list cleaning.

Spam Complaint Rate: 0.01% portfolio average. Well below the 0.1% threshold that causes problems with ISPs.

Deliverability is the good-news section. Spam rates are Excellent for roughly a third of the portfolio. Unsubscribe rates are manageable across the board. The main thing here is to not break what's working by over-sending in Q1. The temptation after a slow January is to increase frequency. That's usually a mistake.

Flows vs. Campaigns

The core comparison:

Flows have lower open rates but higher everything else. That's because flow recipients are a smaller, more intentional audience — they triggered the flow by taking an action. They don't all open, but the ones who do are far more likely to click and buy.

The unsub rate is also higher for flows, which looks bad until you consider what's happening. Flows hit people at high-frequency moments (welcome series, cart abandonment). Some recipients unsub during those sequences. That's healthy — they're self-selecting out early rather than becoming dead weight on your list.

Spotlight: Flows vs. Campaigns — The Revenue Gap Nobody Talks About

Most email programs spend 80% of their time on campaigns and 20% on flows.

We see it constantly — weekly send calendars, content planning docs, design queues all focused on the next broadcast. "What are we sending Tuesday?" is the most common question in email marketing.

Meanwhile, flows quietly do the heavy lifting.

In January, flows and campaigns generated almost identical total revenue — $387K vs. $386K. But flows reached 18x fewer people to get there. That's not a small efficiency gap. That's a fundamentally different economics model.

The Numbers, Brand by Brand

Here's the Flow Multiplier for every brand in the portfolio:

The Food & Bev Scale brand is the most dramatic example. Campaign RPR: $0.06. Flow RPR: $4.75. A 75x multiplier. Their flows (welcome, cart abandonment, checkout abandonment, browse abandonment) generated $198,589 from just 41,975 recipients. Their campaigns generated $225,369 from 3.62 million recipients.

Think about that. The campaigns needed 86x more people to generate only 13% more revenue.

The Apparel Emerging brand is second — 52x multiplier with a flow RPR of $9.29. Small list, high AOV ($527 flow AOV), and well-built automation sequences. This is what happens when flows get real attention.

At the other end, the Spirits & Beverage brand has a 2x multiplier — the lowest in the portfolio. Their campaign RPR is $0.66, which is actually the highest campaign RPR of any brand (they have a small, highly engaged list of 8,700 campaign recipients). Even here, flows still win.

Why the Gap Exists

Campaigns are broadcasts. You pick a segment, write an email, hit send. The recipients didn't ask for that specific email at that specific time. Some will open. A fraction will click. A smaller fraction will buy.

Flows are triggered by behavior. Someone added a product to their cart. Someone started checkout and left. Someone just signed up. The email arrives when the intent is fresh and the context is specific.

This isn't a design problem or a copywriting problem. It's a physics problem. Intent-based triggers will always outperform broadcasts on a per-recipient basis. The question isn't whether to prioritize flows — it's how much you're leaving on the table by not doing it.

The Conversion Gap

Campaign conversion rates across the portfolio range from 0.01% to 0.23%. Flow conversion rates range from 0.20% to 1.76%. These aren't even the same ballpark.

The conversion gap ranges from 1.3x (smallest) to 36x (largest). The widest gaps tend to show up in apparel and food & bev — verticals where browse and cart abandonment flows catch high-intent shoppers mid-decision. One apparel brand's flows convert at 1.08%, meaning 1 in 93 flow recipients places an order. For campaigns at the same brand, it's 1 in 3,333. Same products, same customers. The difference is timing and context.

The AOV Gap

Flows also drive higher average order values in most cases. We see flow AOV running 1.4x to 2.3x higher than campaign AOV across the majority of the portfolio. One food & bev brand: $284 campaign AOV vs. $647 flow AOV. A spirits brand: $252 vs. $484.

This makes sense. Cart abandonment and checkout abandonment flows catch people mid-purchase. They already had a cart built. The average cart value of someone who abandons tends to be higher than the average order from a promotional campaign — the big-ticket buyers are more likely to hesitate and leave.

Not every brand shows this pattern — a couple of brands have slightly lower flow AOV than campaign AOV — but the trend across the portfolio is clear.

The Reframe

Here's the uncomfortable question: if flows generate 2–75x more revenue per recipient, why do most brands spend 80% of their email effort on campaigns?

The answer is that campaigns feel productive. You can plan them. Schedule them. Put them on a content calendar. They generate visible activity. "We sent 8 campaigns this month" sounds like work got done.

Flows feel like set-it-and-forget-it. You build them once and they run. There's no weekly meeting about your welcome flow. Nobody asks "what's the flow strategy for next Tuesday?"

But the data is clear. If you want to move the revenue needle, the highest-ROI work is almost always in flows:

• Build the missing ones. Most brands we audit are missing 3–5 flow triggers. Browse abandonment is the most commonly missing. So is post-purchase.
• Optimize the existing ones. A/B test subject lines, timing, content. A 10% improvement in a high-traffic flow compounds every day.
• Add branches for different segments. First-time vs. repeat buyers. High-value vs. low-value carts. VIPs vs. new subscribers. One-size-fits-all flows leave money on the table.
• Extend sequences. Most abandoned cart flows are 2–3 emails. They should be 4–5, spaced over 7–10 days. The incremental emails don't cannibalize — they catch the people who needed more time.

One hour spent improving a high-traffic flow will almost always outperform one hour spent on the next campaign. That's the takeaway from January's data, and we'd bet it holds every month going forward.

What We'd Do About It

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

1. Audit flow coverage. Every brand should have at minimum: welcome, abandoned cart, checkout abandonment, browse abandonment, post-purchase, and winback flows. Most brands are missing at least one. The data shows even the lowest Flow Multiplier (2x) makes adding flows worthwhile. If you only have a welcome flow and an abandoned cart flow, you're leaving significant revenue on the table.

2. Stop obsessing over click rates. Click rates skew lower when you send to broader audiences — and that's fine. We send broad because it generates more total revenue. If click rate is your north star, you'll end up sending to a tiny engaged segment and leaving money on the table. Watch click rate for directional trends. Optimize for revenue per send.

3. Don't sacrifice deliverability for volume. Spam and unsub rates are excellent. January's bounce rate is slightly elevated across a few brands. We're running list cleaning and tightening engagement-based sending. The temptation in a slow month is to send more to make up the revenue gap from December. Resist it. The brands that over-send in January pay for it in February with lower engagement and worse inbox placement.

4. Explore upsell/cross-sell in flows. Flows drive higher AOV across nearly every brand. There's room to add product recommendation blocks, bundle offers, and upsell steps within existing flow sequences — especially post-purchase flows. If your post-purchase flow is just a thank-you email and a review request, you're missing the window when a customer is most receptive to buying again.

5. Segment by behavior, not engagement. We send broad — that's intentional. But within those broad sends, segmenting by purchase behavior (customers vs. non-customers, first-time vs. repeat, lapsed) makes the content more relevant without shrinking the audience. The Spirits brand's campaign RPR ($0.66) is 11x higher than the portfolio average ($0.06), partly because their messaging is tightly matched to buyer stage.

How to Read This Report

This report aggregates anonymized data from 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. This means the Food & Bev (Scale) brand — with 3.67M of the portfolio's 7.1M 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 report will be published monthly. Each edition includes a rotating Spotlight topic. Historical comparisons will build over time as we accumulate months of data. February's Spotlight: the click rate gap — why it's the universal weak spot and why we don't care.