E-Commerce Email Marketing Benchmarks 2025: How Does Your Brand Stack Up?

Every brand wants to know: “Are our email numbers good?” The honest answer is always “it depends.” But that doesn’t mean benchmarks are useless. They give you a baseline, a target, and — most importantly — a diagnostic tool. If your abandoned cart flow converts at 2% when the benchmark is 8%, you know something is broken.

We manage Klaviyo accounts for hundreds of e-commerce brands. Every quarter, we analyze performance data across our client base and cross-reference it with industry reports from Klaviyo, Mailchimp, Omnisend, and Litmus.

Here are the 2025 benchmarks that matter, what’s changed from last year, and how to interpret them for your store.

Key Takeaways

• Average e-commerce email open rates have stabilized at 42-46% in 2025 (inflated by Apple MPP — real engagement is closer to 22-26%)
• Click rates are the metric that matters most now, averaging 1.8-2.4% across e-commerce
• Revenue per email (RPE) is the only metric that directly ties to your bottom line — target $0.08-$0.15 for campaigns, $0.50-$2.00+ for flows
• Automated flows should generate 40-60% of total email revenue, with campaigns making up the rest
• SMS click rates average 8-12%, but revenue per message is 3-5x higher than email
• Brands that segment see 14% higher open rates and 65% higher click rates than those sending to full lists

Understanding the Metrics (And Their Limitations)

Before we dive into numbers, a critical caveat: Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection (MPP), introduced in 2021, continues to inflate open rates. MPP pre-loads email pixels for Apple Mail users, registering an “open” even if the person never looked at the email.

In 2025, roughly 55-60% of email opens are from Apple Mail. This means:

• Reported open rates are 15-20 percentage points higher than actual human opens
• Open rates are increasingly unreliable as a standalone metric
• Click rate, conversion rate, and revenue per email are now your primary performance indicators

We’ll report both “reported” open rates (what you see in Klaviyo) and “estimated real” open rates (adjusted for MPP) where relevant.

Campaign Benchmarks

Open Rates by Industry

Industry	Reported Open Rate	Estimated Real Open Rate
Health & Beauty	44%	24%
Fashion & Apparel	41%	22%
Food & Beverage	48%	28%
Home & Garden	43%	23%
Pet Products	47%	27%
Jewelry & Accessories	42%	23%
Sports & Outdoors	40%	21%
Electronics	38%	19%
All E-Commerce Average	43%	23%

What changed from 2024: Reported open rates increased by 1-2% across the board as Apple MPP adoption continued to grow. Real open rates remained flat or slightly declined, reflecting inbox saturation across most verticals.

Click Rates by Industry

Click rates are the new open rates. This is where you should focus.

Industry	Average Click Rate	Top 25% Click Rate
Health & Beauty	2.1%	3.4%
Fashion & Apparel	1.7%	2.8%
Food & Beverage	2.6%	4.1%
Home & Garden	1.9%	3.0%
Pet Products	2.4%	3.8%
Jewelry & Accessories	1.5%	2.5%
Sports & Outdoors	2.0%	3.2%
Electronics	1.4%	2.3%
All E-Commerce Average	1.9%	3.1%

What changed from 2024: Click rates dropped by 0.1-0.3% across most industries. The culprit: inbox fatigue. Brands are sending more email, but consumers aren’t clicking more. Quality over quantity matters more than ever.

Revenue Per Email (Campaigns)

Industry	Average RPE	Top 25% RPE
Health & Beauty	$0.09	$0.18
Fashion & Apparel	$0.07	$0.15
Food & Beverage	$0.11	$0.22
Home & Garden	$0.08	$0.17
Pet Products	$0.10	$0.20
Jewelry & Accessories	$0.12	$0.25
Sports & Outdoors	$0.08	$0.16
Electronics	$0.06	$0.13
All E-Commerce Average	$0.09	$0.18

Jewelry stands out here — lower click rates but higher RPE because the average order value is significantly higher. RPE is heavily influenced by your AOV, so cross-industry comparisons should be taken with context.

Flow Benchmarks

Automated flows are where the real money lives. They consistently outperform campaigns because they’re triggered by specific customer actions — the timing and relevance are built in.

Welcome Series

Metric	Average	Top Performers
Open rate (reported)	52%	65%+
Click rate	4.2%	7%+
Conversion rate	3.1%	5.5%+
Revenue per recipient	$1.90	$4.50+
Optimal emails in series	3-4	5-7

Key insight: The welcome series is the highest-volume flow for most stores. Even small improvements compound. Increasing your revenue per recipient from $1.90 to $3.50 on a store adding 5,000 subscribers/month means an extra $8,000/month from one flow.

Abandoned Cart Flow

Metric	Average	Top Performers
Open rate (reported)	49%	60%+
Click rate	5.8%	9%+
Recovery rate	5.2%	12%+
Revenue per recipient	$3.40	$8.00+
Optimal emails in series	3	3-5

Key insight: Recovery rate is what matters here, not open rate. If you’re recovering less than 5% of abandoned carts, your flow timing, messaging, or incentive strategy needs work. The biggest lever: don’t lead with a discount. Email 1 should be a plain reminder. Save the discount for email 3.

Browse Abandonment Flow

Metric	Average	Top Performers
Open rate (reported)	45%	55%+
Click rate	3.1%	5.5%+
Conversion rate	1.4%	3.2%+
Revenue per recipient	$0.85	$2.20+

Key insight: Browse abandonment is an underutilized flow. Many brands skip it entirely, but it’s essentially a free retargeting tool built into your email platform. The key is making it feel helpful, not creepy. “Still thinking about [Product]?” works. “We noticed you were looking at…” does not.

Post-Purchase Flow

Metric	Average	Top Performers
Open rate (reported)	58%	70%+
Click rate	3.8%	6%+
Review collection rate	5%	15%+
Repeat purchase rate (90 days)	18%	35%+

Key insight: Post-purchase has the highest open rates of any flow because the customer is most engaged right after buying. Don’t waste this window on generic “Thanks for your order” emails. Use it for education, cross-sells, and review collection.

Winback Flow

Metric	Average	Top Performers
Open rate (reported)	32%	42%+
Click rate	1.2%	2.5%+
Reactivation rate	3.5%	8%+
Revenue per recipient	$0.45	$1.50+

Key insight: Winback flows have the lowest engagement rates because you’re emailing people who’ve already disengaged. But on a store with a large lapsed customer base, even a 3.5% reactivation rate can recover significant revenue. Trigger timing matters: start the winback sequence at 60-90 days post-last-purchase for most brands, earlier for consumable products.

Channel Comparison: Email vs. SMS

Metric	Email	SMS
Average open rate (reported)	43%	98%
Average click rate	1.9%	8.5%
Average conversion rate	0.08%	0.25%
Revenue per message	$0.09	$0.35
Cost per message	$0.001-$0.003	$0.01-$0.03
ROI	36:1	12:1
Unsubscribe rate	0.15%	0.8%

The takeaway: Email has a dramatically higher ROI because it’s essentially free to send. SMS has higher engagement and revenue per message but costs more per send and has a higher unsubscribe rate. The best strategy uses both: email for nurturing and content, SMS for time-sensitive alerts and high-intent moments (cart abandonment, flash sales, back-in-stock).

Revenue Attribution Benchmarks

How much revenue should email generate for your store?

Revenue Tier	Email as % of Total Revenue	Flow vs. Campaign Split
< $500K/year	15-25%	60% flows / 40% campaigns
$500K-$2M/year	25-35%	50% flows / 50% campaigns
$2M-$10M/year	30-40%	45% flows / 55% campaigns
$10M+/year	25-35%	40% flows / 60% campaigns

Key insight: Larger stores typically see a higher share from campaigns because they have the volume and team to execute sophisticated campaign calendars. Smaller stores lean more heavily on flows because automation does the work without requiring constant manual effort.

If your email program generates less than 20% of total revenue, it’s underperforming. If flows account for less than 35% of email revenue, your automation infrastructure needs attention.

Deliverability Benchmarks

None of the above matters if your emails don’t reach the inbox.

Metric	Healthy	Warning	Critical
Inbox placement rate	95%+	85-95%	< 85%
Bounce rate	< 0.5%	0.5-2%	> 2%
Spam complaint rate	< 0.02%	0.02-0.05%	> 0.05%
Unsubscribe rate per campaign	< 0.2%	0.2-0.5%	> 0.5%
List growth rate (net)	5%+/mo	2-5%/mo	< 2%/mo

Critical for 2025: Google and Yahoo’s sender requirements (enforced since February 2024) have made authentication non-negotiable. If you haven’t set up DKIM, SPF, and DMARC for your sending domain, your deliverability is suffering. Klaviyo’s dedicated sending domain feature handles DKIM and SPF automatically — make sure it’s properly configured.

How to Diagnose Your Performance

Use this decision tree to identify where your email program needs work:

If your open rates are below average:

1. Check deliverability first — are you hitting the inbox?
2. Review your subject lines — A/B test 5 different approaches
3. Audit your sending frequency — too many emails cause fatigue
4. Clean your list — remove 90-day non-openers from campaign sends

If your click rates are below average:

1. Audit your email design — is the CTA above the fold? Is there one clear action?
2. Check your content relevance — are you segmenting or blasting?
3. Review your offer — is there a compelling reason to click?
4. Test your send time — Klaviyo’s Smart Send Time feature can optimize this

If your revenue per email is below average:

1. Check your landing pages — are you sending people to the right place?
2. Audit your product recommendations — use Klaviyo’s predictive analytics for personalized recs
3. Review your discount strategy — are you training customers to wait for sales?
4. Segment by engagement — your most engaged subscribers should get first access to launches and limited offers

If your flow revenue is below average:

1. Count your active flows — you need at minimum: welcome, abandoned cart, browse abandonment, post-purchase, and winback
2. Check flow email counts — most flows need 3-5 emails, not 1-2
3. Review trigger timing — wrong timing is the #1 flow performance killer
4. Add conditional splits — VIP customers, high-value carts, and first-time vs. repeat buyers should get different messaging

What Top Performers Do Differently

After analyzing the top 10% of our client base, here are the patterns:

1. They send more flows than campaigns. Not more emails total — more automated, triggered emails relative to manual campaigns.
2. They segment aggressively. Every campaign goes to a targeted segment, never the full list. Even “full list” campaigns exclude non-engaged subscribers.
3. They test weekly. Subject lines, send times, CTAs, design layouts. Constant iteration.
4. They clean their lists monthly. Removing unengaged subscribers protects deliverability and improves all metrics.
5. They use both email and SMS. Not either/or. Both channels in a coordinated strategy.
6. They track revenue, not vanity metrics. Open rates are nice. Revenue per subscriber is what pays the bills.

The Bottom Line

Benchmarks are a compass, not a GPS. Your store’s ideal performance depends on your industry, AOV, product type, list quality, and a dozen other factors. But these numbers give you a clear picture of where you stand and where the gaps are.

If you’re below average on most of these benchmarks, the fix is almost always the same: better segmentation, more automated flows, cleaner lists, and consistent testing. That’s not glamorous advice, but it’s what actually moves the needle.

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