Ecommerce email benchmarks by industry
Are you keeping pace with your competitors? Use Klaviyo’s email marketing benchmarks from Q122 to compare, improve and drive more revenue through email marketing.
Email marketing benchmarks by industry for Q122
With more than 100K paying customers, Klaviyo’s ecommerce email marketing metrics are some of the industry’s most reliable. Dig into these averages across the Klaviyo platform to see where you stand on email open rates, click rates, conversion rates, and revenue per recipient in comparison to your industry’s average.
Ecommerce email benchmarks inclusive of all industries
Apparel & accessories email benchmarks
Automotive email benchmarks
Electronics email benchmarks
Food & beverage email benchmarks
Hardware & home improvement email benchmarks
Health & beauty email benchmarks
Home furnishings email benchmarks
Jewelry email benchmarks
Mass merchant email benchmarks
Office supplies email benchmarks
Specialty email benchmarks
Sports & outdoors email benchmarks
Toys & hobbies email benchmarks
Industry
Go deeper
Avoid the top-of-funnel tax
In 2021, the bread and butter of DTC marketing—Facebook Ads—lost major efficacy to Apple’s iOS 14.5 update. The privacy-first mobile update meant Facebook could no longer target ads as precisely as it used to, or track conversions reliably.
As a result, ecommerce brands need a different way to scale—and a new playbook. Enter: The owned marketing framework.
8 email performance tips that work, according to experts
Email marketing benchmarks by industry are helpful for understanding where you stand in comparison to other brands like you. But benchmark data doesn’t tell you what to do next—or how to optimize your metrics like your average open rate, click rate, click-through rate, bounce rate, unsubscribe rate, and more.
We talked to 11 email marketing experts to get their best next steps, most overlooked email marketing best practices, and more. Use them to help your team improve your email marketing campaigns and automations by increasing your average click rates—and average email performance in general.
Collect zero-party data––and actually use it
Ben Zettler, digital marketing & ecommerce consultant, Ben Zettler Digital
“Dynamic content within email marketing campaigns and flows can be extremely powerful when done well. Focus on specific messaging that aligns with a particular group of users’ interests. How do you get there? Surveys, quizzes, etc. As buzzwordy as it sounds, zero-party data is the key to unlocking the potential of your email and text marketing program.”
Tennessee Allgood, lifecycle marketing senior manager, Stak Agency
“Personalize your emails. You want to personalize your emails the best you can with the data you have. Personalization will help your user experience stay relevant and keep them coming back for more.”
Make your emails conversational––and you’ll stay out of spam, too
Christopher Maroney-Petitt at Ecom Growers
“The reply email is often overlooked. Ask people to reply to 1) engage in a poll, 2) be put on an early access list for a product launch, or 3) answer a question that helps with list segmentation. Just ask people to share and engage beyond opening and clicking.”
Adam Kitchen, CEO, Magnet Monster
“Use email as a 2-way communication channel with customers. It’s grossly underused, but it has innumerable benefits if executed well for engagement rates, email deliverability, and sales.”
Eli Mitchell, director of partnerships at Lexer
“Use proactive 1-to-1 outreach for your high-value VIP customers. No frills in the design templates, these simple text-based emails or SMS messages build real human connections with customers. Despite the simple design, the experience feels premium and has been shown to increase engagement rate, upsell, and cross-sell.”
A/B test everything––send times, number of emails, CTAs, SMS vs. email, and more
Brandon Matis, owner at Luxor Marketing
“A/B testing send times is one of the most underrated strategies I see with brands. Just by testing morning sends vs. night sends––or day of the week––you might see an extraordinary difference in conversions.”
Ryan O’Connor, director of growth, SmartBug Media
“A missed opportunity for many brands is to A/B test key flow messages with both an email and an SMS version. Oftentimes, one channel performs differently depending on the brand and where the customer is in their journey.”
Ashley Ismailovski, CRO operations manager, SmartSites
“Approach your email strategy from a mobile-first perspective. The large majority of emails that brands send are opened on smartphones instead of a computer or laptop. When testing your email design, make sure it looks great on mobile devices in addition to the standard desktop layout.”
Ananda Farge, senior strategist, CRM and email, Tinuiti
“Increasing cadence––such as adding a lot of resends––can quickly cause list fatigue and drive subscribers away. Focusing on inactive segments––long-term unengaged contacts––often results in low performance and can unleash email deliverability issues. While it’s a good idea to have a re-engagement strategy in place, suddenly emailing a large group of inactive contacts can create spikes in email bounce rate, including hard bounces and complaints, and can even lead to blocklisting. The recommendation here is to be cautious, and ask yourself if the efforts invested in re-engaging inactive segments could instead be automated, and energy reinvested in list growth––therefore focusing on the future, not the past.”
Don’t ignore customer data and signals––change how you communicate, instead
Abby Siciliano, email expert and director business development, Tinuiti
“If an email recipient hasn’t opened an email in a month, don’t continue to send the same content at the same cadence to them. Reach out in a different way. Ask for a preferences update, or offer a discount. If a subscriber opens every email and never clicks, that’s an opportunity for a different type of outreach.”
Brittany Rycroft, director of marketing, GhostRetail
“Don’t simply point customers to a product page. Point them to an experience with relevant content. The typical experience of ‘clicking around a catalog from an email’ really hasn’t changed that much in the past 30 years. Use email marketing to direct customers to a more interactive experience, whether it’s through a livestream event, 1:1 video co-shopping, or a metaverse implementation.”
Email marketing automations are powerful––and still underutilized
Darin Lynch, founder and CEO, Irish Titan
“Explore having some fun with your automated emails. Use your abandoned carts, email confirmation and more as an extra reinforcement of your brand. It’s small, but when merchants do it well, it shines.”
Christine Watson, director of CRM and email, Tinuiti
“If you have the capabilities, it is a great idea to get your browse and cart abandon content in your regular marketing sends or triggers for that particular audience. If someone has something in their cart and you remind them in your other promotional sends or automations, that could be the deciding factor to push them to convert.”
Sharon Goldstein, CEO, LimeSpot
“Your transactional emails are an unsung place to get the flywheel going for your next sale. Email open rates of order confirmations, shipping confirmations, and other account-related messages are as high as 60%. Yet, most marketers are missing out on a golden opportunity to spotlight other items a shopper may be interested in based on what they’ve just bought. Insert personalized product recommendations that update when the email is opened, not sent, to re-engage this captive audience for more sales.”
Back in stock flows aren’t as common as you think they are––and they work!
Toccara Karizma, CEO, Karizma Marketing
“The most underused email marketing strategy I tend to see in my agency is implementing a back-in-stock flow. Klaviyo makes this very easy to do via email marketing automation, but because it requires a little code, I think many online business owners shy away from it. But the back-in-stock flow can generate the most revenue per recipient out of all email flows, including a welcome series or abandoned cart series, which is why it is so important to implement.”
Don’t overlook post-promotion campaigns––or you’ll leave money on the table
Hannah Spicer, Director, Hannah Spicer Consulting
“Send sweep-up email campaigns after a promotion ends by pulling a segment of anyone who was on your site during the promotion but didn’t place an order. Send them an extended code for 24 hours.”
Pop-ups should be personalized, too––and not just top of funnel
Katherine Burlock, CLV strategist, &BAM
“Use pop-ups for more than just incentivizing people to join your email list. You can create popups for certain segments of your list—for example, if someone has bought 3+ times, you could have a pop-up offering them a special gift since you know they are a valuable customer. Also, align your overall marketing plan with your SMS and email marketing strategy, and use similar creative across ads, email, and your website to give a consistent user experience.”
These email recommendations and tips should not be relied on as legal advice. Klaviyo encourages you to work with your legal counsel to make sure your campaigns are compliant with all applicable laws.
