Email Engagement Benchmarks: 83M Emails, 16 Brands

The brand in our portfolio that sends the most email — nearly 18 emails per subscriber per month — has a click rate of 6.55%. That's above the portfolio median.

The brand that sends the least — fewer than 2 emails per month — has a click rate of 1.83%.

Everyone tells you not to over-email your list. Eighty-three million emails say the opposite: send frequency doesn't determine engagement. Content quality does. The brands that send the most aren't burning out their lists. The brands that send the least aren't protecting them.

We manage email for DTC brands across food & bev, apparel, health & wellness, beauty, jewelry, home goods, and spirits. Over the last 12 months, those brands sent 83 million emails to a combined subscriber base of over 1 million profiles. This is the engagement breakdown — open rates, click rates, click-to-open rates, send frequency, and monthly trends, anonymized and benchmarked.

Last month we published subscriber value benchmarks covering what each email subscriber is worth. This is the companion piece — what engagement actually looks like inside those email programs.

Email Engagement at a Glance

Portfolio: 16 brands · 7+ verticals · 83M emails · 12-month window

Table: Email Engagement Benchmarks — Portfolio Aggregate

*Excluding one outlier brand with a calculated open rate above 100% due to Apple Mail Privacy Protection triggering multiple open events per recipient.

What is click-to-open rate? CTOR measures the percentage of people who clicked after opening. It strips out subject line performance and list quality — it tells you whether the email content itself is working. An 8.2% aggregate CTOR means that of everyone who opened an email across this portfolio, 8.2% clicked through. It's the closest thing email has to a pure content quality metric.

The gap between the aggregate and median tells the story of scale. The aggregate (volume-weighted) is pulled down by large-list brands sending to broad audiences. The median is the per-brand center point, less influenced by any single sender's volume. For benchmarking your own brand, compare against the median.

Engagement by Brand Archetype

The aggregate hides three distinct engagement profiles. Where your brand falls determines which metrics to focus on and which levers to pull.

Table: Email Engagement Archetypes

Notice the open rate ranges overlap across all three archetypes. That's the point. Open rate doesn't separate good email programs from bad ones. CTOR does.

Content Winners

These brands get clicks when people open. CTOR ranges from 10% to 23% — meaning 1 in 10 to 1 in 4 openers click through. Click rates range from 5% to 10%. Seven brands fall into this archetype, spanning food & bev, apparel, workwear, jewelry, health & wellness, general retail, and luxury fashion.

The defining characteristic: these brands have email content worth clicking on. Product selection is sharp. CTAs are specific. The emails answer "why should I click this right now?" — not just "here's what's new."

The most striking example: a luxury fashion brand with a 5,000-subscriber list generates a 23% CTOR while sending 13 emails per subscriber per month. That's the highest send frequency and the highest content engagement in the portfolio. These aren't contradicting each other — the frequency works because every email delivers value.

At the other end of this archetype, a food & bev brand at scale (245K subscribers) sends 18 emails per month and still maintains a 10.5% CTOR. High volume, high engagement. The content earns the frequency.

Send frequency across this archetype ranges from 3.4 to 17.9 emails per month. If frequency were the variable that determined engagement, the low-frequency brands would dominate. They don't. A luxury apparel brand sending 3.4 emails per month has a 12% CTOR. A food & bev brand sending 18 has 10.5%. What separates this archetype isn't how often they email. It's what's inside the email.

Opens Outpacing Clicks

These brands have solid open rates — 30% to 70% — but moderate click-through once people get inside. CTOR sits between 6% and 9%. People open because they recognize and trust the brand. They don't always click because the content doesn't give them a strong enough reason.

A health & wellness brand in this group has the portfolio's highest non-MPP open rate at 70% but a CTOR of 8.3%. A beauty brand opens at 60% with a 7.4% CTOR. A supplements brand: 64% open, 6.8% CTOR.

The pattern: these brands have solved the inbox problem. People see their name and open. What they haven't solved is the content problem — making the email itself worthy of a click. The gap between their open rate performance and their CTOR performance is the opportunity.

For these brands, subject line optimization is a waste of time. People already open. The ROI is in redesigning what happens after the open — stronger product features, clearer CTAs, more specific offers, better content hierarchy inside the email.

Content Gap

These brands sit below 5% CTOR and below 2.5% click rate. Open rates range from 27% to 67%.

One fashion brand has 57% open rates on a 146K-subscriber list but only a 3.4% CTOR and 1.85% click rate. The list is large, the brand has recognition, but the content isn't converting attention into action. This is an "Opens Outpacing Clicks" problem at an extreme — the gap between open performance and content performance is massive.

At the other end, a food & bev brand with 16K subscribers has a 27% open rate and 1.2% click rate. This is a list health problem — low opens suggest deliverability issues, list quality issues, or both. Content optimization won't help if emails aren't reaching the inbox or aren't being seen.

The common thread: these brands are sending email because they're supposed to, not because the program is engineered to perform. The gap between where they are and where the Content Winners sit is 3-5x on CTOR and 3-5x on click rate. Our complete flow guide covers the architecture that separates top performers. But that also means the upside is significant. Moving from a 3% CTOR to a 10% CTOR on a 150K list is a meaningful revenue swing — and it costs nothing in list growth or acquisition spend.

Open Rate Benchmarks

Aggregate open rate: 54.4%. Median across brands: 59.5%. Range: 26.8% to 70.3% (excluding the MPP outlier).

Those numbers are inflated. Apple Mail Privacy Protection pre-fetches email content, triggering an "open" even when the subscriber never looked at the email. Across the industry, MPP inflates open rates by an estimated 15-20 percentage points. Adjusted for MPP, real open rates across this portfolio are likely in the 35-55% range.

One brand in the portfolio shows a calculated open rate of 138% — more opens than recipients. This isn't real engagement. It's MPP triggering multiple open events per email. We include this brand in the dataset but exclude it from open rate benchmarks.

Open rate distribution (15 brands, excluding >100% outlier):

Open rates above 60% are strong by any measure, even accounting for MPP. These brands have built inbox recognition — subscribers see the sender name and open. Open rates below 40% signal a potential deliverability or list quality problem worth investigating.

The bottom line on open rates: they're worth monitoring for trends (is yours declining month over month?) but unreliable as an absolute benchmark. Two brands with identical content quality can have wildly different open rates based on their subscriber base's device mix. If 80% of your subscribers use Apple Mail, your open rate is inflated. Watch CTOR instead.

Click Rate Benchmarks

Aggregate click rate: 4.5%. Median across brands: 5.1%. Range: 1.2% to 10.4%.

Click rate requires a real human action — someone had to click a link. MPP can't fake it. That makes click rate a more reliable engagement signal than open rate, though it's still influenced by list size, audience breadth, and whether you're measuring campaigns alone or blended with flows.

Click rate distribution:

The highest click rate in the portfolio — 10.4% — comes from a luxury fashion brand with a 5,000-subscriber list. Small list, highly curated audience, strong content. That's the ceiling for what a well-run niche brand can achieve.

The lowest — 1.2% — comes from a food & bev brand with a 16K-subscriber list and significant list quality issues (27% open rate suggests many subscribers aren't seeing the emails at all).

The volume effect on click rate: the two largest senders in the portfolio (245K and 201K subscribers) have click rates of 6.55% and 2.42% respectively. Same scale, 2.7x difference in click rate. List size doesn't determine click rate. What you do with the list does.

An important note on comparison: Klaviyo's published industry average for campaign click rate is 1.29%. Our portfolio aggregate of 4.5% is well above that, but the comparison isn't apples to apples. Our data includes both campaigns and flows, and our click rate metric is calculated per subscriber rather than per email delivered. For a campaign-only comparison, our January benchmarks showed a 0.53% campaign click rate — below the industry average, deliberately, because we send to broader audiences to maximize total revenue.

Click-to-Open Rate Benchmarks

Aggregate CTOR: 8.2%. Median across brands: 8.3%. Range: 3.1% to 23.0%.

What is click-to-open rate? CTOR = unique clicks / unique opens. It measures what percentage of people who opened the email went on to click. It strips out two variables that distort raw open and click rates — deliverability and subject line performance. What's left is a measure of content quality: given that someone opened, did the email content compel them to act?

CTOR distribution:

A 23% CTOR means nearly 1 in 4 openers clicked. That's exceptional. The brand achieving it is a luxury fashion brand with a small, curated list and high-frequency sends. Every email features a small number of specific products with strong creative. Fewer products, sharper focus, more clicks.

A 3.1% CTOR means 1 in 32 openers clicked. The brand here is a spirits brand with 67% open rates — strong brand recognition, weak content conversion. People love opening their emails. They rarely click. That's a content problem hiding behind good open rates.

CTOR is the metric that matters most for email optimization. Open rate tells you about subject lines and brand recognition. Click rate tells you about total program performance. CTOR tells you about content quality. If you can only watch one metric for the health of your email program, watch CTOR.

If your CTOR is below 6%, your email content needs a redesign. Not a subject line tweak. Not a send time change. The actual content — product selection, offer structure, CTA clarity, visual hierarchy — isn't earning the click.

Send Frequency Benchmarks

Median: 5.5 emails per subscriber per month. Range: 1.6 to 17.9.

Most brands send 4-7 emails per subscriber per month. A few send considerably more. A few considerably less.

Send frequency distribution:

Read that table again. The high-frequency senders have better click rates AND better CTOR than the low-frequency senders. More emails, more engagement, not less.

This isn't survivorship bias. The brands that send more email tend to invest more in their email programs — better content, better segmentation, better automation. Frequency itself isn't what drives the engagement. But it correlates strongly with the operational maturity that does.

The fear of "email fatigue" is the most common reason brands throttle their send frequency. Our email volume vs revenue analysis found the same pattern across revenue data. The data doesn't support it. Across the portfolio:

• Unsubscribe rates range from 0.15% to 0.97% with no correlation to send frequency
• The highest-frequency sender (17.9 emails/mo) has the lowest unsubscribe rate in the portfolio (0.15%)
• Spam complaint rate is 0.013% across the portfolio — well below the 0.1% threshold that causes problems with ISPs

If over-sending were burning lists, you'd see it in unsub and spam rates at the high end. You don't.

Monthly Engagement Trends

Here's how engagement moved across the portfolio over 12 months:

Table: Monthly Email Engagement Trends (March 2025 — February 2026)

Three patterns emerge:

Q4 is the engagement peak. October through December have the highest CTOR of the year (9.0-9.3%) despite also having the highest email volume (7.7-8.9M sends). More emails, better engagement. Q4 emails are higher-stakes, better-produced, and more relevant to buyers who are actively shopping. The content quality rises to match the moment.

Summer is the content trough. June through September see the lowest CTOR of the year (7.4-7.8%). Open rates hold steady — subscribers are still there. They're just not clicking. Brands coast on lighter content during the slow months. If you want to improve annual engagement metrics, invest in summer content quality instead of pulling back.

Volume and engagement move together. The correlation across months is positive, not negative. The highest-volume months (Oct-Dec) have the best CTOR. The lowest-volume months (Jul-Sep) have among the worst. At the portfolio level, more email equals more engagement — when the content is there.

Spotlight: The Volume-Engagement Tradeoff That Doesn't Exist

This is the finding we kept coming back to across every cut of the data: there is no tradeoff between email volume and engagement quality. The conventional wisdom says "send less, get better engagement." Across 83 million emails and 16 brands, the data says otherwise.

The Brand-Level Evidence

Here are the five highest-frequency senders in the portfolio and their engagement metrics:

And the four lowest-frequency senders:

If frequency killed engagement, the first table would show declining metrics and the second would show strong ones. That's not what happens.

The top sender (17.9 emails/month) has a CTOR of 10.48% — above the portfolio median of 8.3%. The second-highest sender (13.3/month) has the best CTOR in the entire portfolio at 23%. Meanwhile, the lowest-frequency sender (1.6/month) has a click rate of 1.83% — near the bottom of the portfolio.

Now look at the unsub rates. The two highest-frequency senders have unsub rates of 0.15% and 0.17% — the lowest in the portfolio. The lowest-frequency senders? Unsub rates of 0.71% and 0.97%. The brands sending the most email see the least unsubscribe activity. The brands sending the least see the most.

High frequency doesn't guarantee good engagement either. The fifth-highest sender (8 emails/month, fashion at scale) has a 3.42% CTOR — among the worst in the portfolio. And low frequency doesn't guarantee poor engagement. The luxury apparel brand sending 3.4 emails per month has a 12.02% CTOR — among the best.

The Monthly Evidence

The same pattern shows up in the time series. The three highest-volume months are October (7.7M sends), November (8.9M), and December (8.8M). Those same three months have the three highest CTORs of the year: 9.3%, 9.2%, and 9.0%.

The three lowest-volume months are July (5.0M), August (5.4M), and September (5.7M). Their CTORs: 7.5%, 7.8%, and 7.4%.

Across the 12-month window, the correlation between monthly email volume and CTOR is positive. Not negative. Not neutral. Positive.

Why the Conventional Wisdom Is Wrong

The "don't over-email" advice rests on a reasonable-sounding premise: people get annoyed by too much email, so they'll disengage. And that's true — for bad email. If every email you send is a generic "check out our sale" blast, more frequency will absolutely burn your list.

But that's not what the high-frequency brands in this portfolio are doing. The food & bev brand sending 18 emails per month runs a mix of recipes, product features, seasonal content, educational material, and promotional sends. The luxury fashion brand sending 13 per month showcases specific products with strong editorial creative. The workwear brand sending 9.5 per month mixes B2B and B2C content with product-focused CTAs.

These brands can email often because each email earns the next open. Frequency is the output of content quality, not the enemy of it.

The Reframe

"How often should I email my list?" is the wrong question. The brands asking that question are usually asking it because they don't trust their own content. They're sending emails they know aren't great and hoping fewer of them will cause less damage.

The right question is: "Is my CTOR above 10%?" If it is, you can almost certainly send more. If it isn't, sending less won't fix it. Sending better will.

The food & bev brand sending 18 emails per month with a 10.5% CTOR and a 0.15% unsub rate isn't on the verge of burning its list. It's running one of the healthiest, most engaged email programs in our portfolio. And it got there not by sending less, but by making every email worth opening.

What We'd Do About It

Based on 12 months of engagement data across 16 brands, here are five priorities:

1. Make CTOR your primary metric. Open rate is inflated by MPP and unreliable as an absolute benchmark. Click rate is influenced by list size and send strategy. CTOR tells you whether your content is working. If your CTOR is below 6%, you have a content problem that no subject line optimization will solve. Add CTOR to your primary reporting dashboard if it's not there already.

2. Audit your email content, not your subject lines. Half the brands in our portfolio have strong open rates and moderate-to-weak CTOR. The opens are fine. The content isn't converting. Before you A/B test another subject line, look at what happens after the open: product selection, CTA placement, offer structure, visual hierarchy. Most email optimization starts at the wrong end of the funnel. Our quarterly audit framework covers exactly this.

3. Don't throttle sends based on fear. The portfolio's highest-frequency senders have the best engagement metrics and the lowest unsub rates. If you've been holding back sends because you're worried about fatigue, test increasing frequency by 1-2 emails per month and watch CTOR and unsub rate. If CTOR holds and unsubs don't spike, you have room to send more. The constraint should be "how many emails do I have worth sending?" — not an arbitrary frequency cap.

4. Invest in summer content. June through September have the lowest CTOR of the year across the portfolio. Open rates stay consistent — subscribers are still there. They're just not clicking. Most brands treat summer as a quiet season and reduce content investment. The data says that's a self-fulfilling prophecy. The Content Winners in the portfolio maintain strong CTOR year-round because they don't coast on lighter content during slow months.

5. Use CTOR to diagnose, not just monitor. If your open rate is high and your CTOR is low, your problem is content, not audience. If your open rate is low and your CTOR is reasonable, your problem is deliverability or list quality, not content. If both are low, start with deliverability — great content that lands in spam generates zero engagement. CTOR separates content problems from distribution problems. Use it that way.

Want us to benchmark your email program against these numbers? We run this analysis for every new client.

How to Calculate Your Email Engagement Metrics

Four steps. Five minutes in Klaviyo.

Step 1: Pull open rate, click rate, and CTOR from Klaviyo Analytics for the last 12 months. Filter by campaigns and flows. CTOR isn't shown by default in all views — calculate it as (unique clicks / unique opens) x 100 if needed.

Step 2: Calculate emails per subscriber per month. Total emails sent in the last 12 months, divided by your average active list size, divided by 12. This gives you your effective send frequency.

Step 3: Compare against the benchmarks.

Step 4: Identify your archetype. If CTOR is above 10%, you're a Content Winner — focus on scaling what's working. If open rates are strong but CTOR is 6-9%, you're in Opens Outpacing Clicks territory — focus on content quality inside the email. If click rate and CTOR are both weak, start with deliverability and list hygiene before optimizing content.

Email Engagement Benchmarks FAQ

What is a good email open rate for e-commerce?

The median across our portfolio is 59.5%, but open rates are inflated by Apple Mail Privacy Protection. Adjusted for MPP, real open rates are likely 35-55%. Don't benchmark against absolute open rate numbers — the device mix of your subscriber base matters more than your content quality. Watch for month-over-month trends and use CTOR as your primary engagement metric instead.

What is a good email click rate?

The median across our portfolio is 5.1% (including campaigns and flows). Klaviyo's published industry average for campaigns alone is 1.29%. Click rate varies significantly by list size, send strategy, and campaign-to-flow mix. If you're above 5%, you're performing well. Below 3% warrants investigation.

What is click-to-open rate (CTOR) and why does it matter?

CTOR = unique clicks / unique opens. It measures what percentage of people who opened your email clicked through. It's the most reliable measure of email content quality because it strips out subject line performance and deliverability. The median CTOR across our portfolio is 8.3%. Above 10% is strong. Below 6% indicates a content problem.

How many emails should I send per month?

The median across our portfolio is 5.5 per subscriber per month. The range is 1.6 to 17.9. The highest-frequency sender has the best click rate and lowest unsubscribe rate in the portfolio. Send frequency should be determined by how much valuable content you can produce, not by an arbitrary limit. If your CTOR stays above 8% and your unsub rate stays below 0.5%, you have room to send more.

Does sending more email hurt engagement?

Not according to our data. Across 16 brands and 12 months, there is no negative correlation between send frequency and engagement metrics. The highest-frequency senders have the best CTOR and click rates. Unsubscribe rates don't increase with frequency either. The caveat: the brands sending the most email also invest the most in content quality. Sending more bad email will hurt engagement. Sending more good email won't.

What's the difference between click rate and CTOR?

Click rate = unique clicks / recipients. It's influenced by everything: deliverability, subject line, content, list quality, send frequency. CTOR = unique clicks / unique opens. It isolates content quality by only measuring people who already opened. Click rate tells you about your total program performance. CTOR tells you about your content performance specifically.