3 industry use cases for Klaviyo benchmarks that give brands a “true north”

If you’re a seasoned marketer, you probably spend a lot of time doing market research.

You may be trying to figure out answers to questions like:

• What email marketing tactics are our competitors using?
• What is the market doing as a whole?
• What are appropriate KPIs for my brand?

While it’s always a good idea to have your finger on the pulse of your industry, in this day and age, your customer relationship management (CRM) platform should really take some of that work off your plate.

A good CRM can help your brand:

• Earn more revenue.
• Be more efficient.
• Get a better understanding of your customers.
• Personalize your marketing efforts.

And, ideally, it should lay all the groundwork for this as well, by giving you clear and accurate benchmarks.

As senior retention marketing manager at Mint & Lily, my overarching goal is to increase the email marketing footprint of our total revenue.

My team and I rely on Klaviyo benchmarks to keep us informed without spinning our wheels—so we can focus on that growth intelligently.

1. Streamline your market research without the googling

We’ve all been there: googling industry benchmarks and crossing our fingers that they’re reliable. Prior to using Klaviyo benchmarks, my team would take into account those numbers that we found from googling alongside our brand’s own metrics, and from there, we would create our marketing strategy.

This isn’t an unreasonable way to plan, but it’s not as efficient as it could be. When we started relying on Klaviyo benchmarks, we noticed two pretty big upsides:

1. We saved time. Not only are Klaviyo benchmarks easy to locate and digest, we stopped wasting time tracking down reliable data.
2. We zeroed in on our own vertical. While it may be interesting to see what kind of numbers brands in other verticals are doing, that kind of data isn’t relevant to our journey. Because Klaviyo’s database is so big, and so trustworthy, we get right to the numbers we should be aiming for.

“One of the biggest time savers has been not having to validate whether the data is trustworthy,” says Hayley Rosales, CRM manager at women’s apparel brand SHEIKE. “With Klaviyo benchmarks, I know the numbers are legit. I can move straight to strategy instead of second-guessing the source.”

2. Improve your bottom-performing KPI metrics—and ditch ballparking

A lot of factors go into planning our content calendar: seasonal holidays, product drops, economic factors, and more. One of the keys to planning strategically is to build your strategy around your bottom-performing KPI metrics.

Look at your metrics against your peer set, then ask yourself: What is a reasonable, actionable goal, based on the data?

If our click rate is lower than we want, we rely on best practices around raising it. Meaning, we may focus more on getting subscribers to click than to actually buy.

If it’s our conversion rate that’s too low, we focus on best practices around raising that.

Having this reliable data alongside our lower-performing KPIs empowers us to round out our marketing strategy, and that makes it easier for our brand to grow sustainably.

There are other, more nuanced uses around KPIs, too.

“We use Klaviyo benchmarks to map out the customer journey for seasonal events,” says Christian Nørberg Enger, chief product officer at Segmento, a full-service marketing agency based in Denmark.

“We evaluate a brand’s seasonal performance against industry norms, which informs our strategies for the weeks following major campaigns,” Nørberg Enger says. “For example, a strong holiday conversion rate can lead to a January loyalty flow to retain new customers.”

3. Leverage your KPIs to make better informed decisions within your email program

Of course, every brand learns from their own wins and misses—but what Klaviyo benchmarks set us up to learn is exactly where we stand amongst our industry peers.

Without benchmarks, we might think one of our top-performing metrics is great, and rest on it. But now that we can see how well our peers are doing, we’re inspired to push even further. And this breadth of knowledge makes our strategizing that much sharper.

“Having access to peer benchmarks gives us a clear signal on where to dig deeper,” says Rosales. “If a metric’s falling behind, we know it’s not just a fluke—it’s a chance to rethink, test, and optimize. Benchmarks keep us from getting complacent and help us constantly improve.”

For example, last year, we looked at our top-performing flows, focusing on 3 metrics: click rate, revenue per recipient (RPR), and conversion rate.

Once you’ve analyzed what’s working and what’s not, apply that to your upcoming campaigns. (For good measure, A/B test your new approach with your old one.)

Nørberg Enger and his team at Segmento developed an internal “KPI system” using Klaviyo benchmarks.

They categorized KPIs into the following:

• Critical: bottom 25%
• Stable: middle, near 50%
• Leading: top 25%

They focus about 60% of efforts on the “critical” KPIs, 30% on “stable,” and 10% on experimenting with “leading” metrics, to maintain their competitive edge.

“This structured approach ensures that you prioritize impact without neglecting any one metric,” Nørberg Enger says.

And, of course—A/B test any new approaches against your existing practices.