Email Marketing Benchmarks Explained: What the Published Numbers Mean

Published email benchmarks put average open rates at about 30% to over 43% and click rates at about 1% to 2.6%, depending on the provider and period. Each provider measures its own customers, so compare your clicks, orders and revenue with your own past results first.

"Is my open rate good?" is one of the first questions every store owner asks. Benchmarks give a rough answer, but only if you know where the numbers come from. Each email platform publishes its own figures, from its own customers, measured its own way, and the results differ widely.

This guide collects published benchmarks from three providers, with the date and source of each, explains what every metric means, and shows how to set a baseline from your own results, which matters more than any industry average. We don't publish benchmarks of our own; every number below belongs to the source named next to it.

Look at the spread. Average open rates run from about 30% to over 43% depending on who is counting, and click rates from about 1% to 2.6%. That is why one number from one source is a poor yardstick.

Klaviyo's 2026 benchmark page makes the clearest case for automation in the published data. It says flows produced nearly 41% of total email revenue from 5.3% of sends, had an average revenue per recipient nearly 18 times higher than campaigns, and placed order rates 13 times higher. Its top 10% of flows reached click rates of 10.48%. These are Klaviyo's figures for its own customers, checked October 19, 2026, and the reason is easy to see: a flow reaches someone right after they did something, like starting checkout.

Klaviyo also publishes placed order rates by industry. A few examples:

Apple's Mail Privacy Protection downloads remote email content in the background by default, whether or not the person engages with the email (checked October 19, 2026). The tracking pixel that records an open loads either way. MailerLite's benchmark page says the same thing in plain terms: Apple Mail Privacy Protection marks emails sent to Apple Mail clients as opened, so real open rates are lower than reported. Mailchimp's page warns that open rate accuracy may be affected by Apple's privacy changes.

So treat opens as a rough signal for subject lines, and judge your email on clicks, orders and revenue.

Some thresholds aren't benchmarks but rules. Google's sender guidelines recommend a spam rate below 0.10% in Postmaster Tools and say to avoid ever reaching 0.30%. Yahoo's best practices say to keep it below 0.3%. Both checked October 19, 2026. If your complaint rate is near those numbers, nothing else in this guide matters until you fix it. The email deliverability guide covers how.

• Separate campaigns and flows: They perform very differently. Average them together and both numbers become meaningless.
• Use your last 3 to 6 months: Take the median click rate, placed order rate and revenue per recipient for regular campaigns. Leave out unusual sends like Black Friday.
• Split by segment: Engaged contacts and your whole list will have very different numbers.
• Track unsubscribes and complaints: A campaign that wins on clicks but doubles complaints is a loss.
• Compare to yourself: Next quarter, the question is whether you beat your own baseline, not someone else's average.

• Clean your list and send mostly to engaged contacts. See how to clean your email list.
• Turn on the core flows before writing more campaigns. See the flows every Shopify store should run.
• Segment by purchase history. See email segmentation examples.
• Test one thing at a time. See email A/B testing.

SmartyTap reports give you the numbers to build your baseline:

• Campaign performance: Delivered, opened, clicked, replied, failed and bounced for every message, plus who was suppressed or skipped by Smart Sending and why.
• Email Analytics: Campaigns and journeys side by side, and a Deliverability tab with delivery, bounce, complaint and reply rates over time.
• Revenue attribution for texts: Orders within 24 hours of a click or 1 hour of delivery count toward a text, with the rules shown next to the numbers.
• UTM tags: Added to store links in every email and text, so Google Analytics and Shopify show each campaign's visits and sales.

Details are in reports and revenue. Glossary: open rate, click-to-open rate, revenue per recipient, Mail Privacy Protection and UTM.

It depends on the source. Klaviyo's 2026 benchmarks put the average at 31% for campaigns and 32.2% for flows; MailerLite's data for December 2024 to November 2025 puts e-commerce at 32.67%. Because Apple Mail Privacy Protection inflates opens, compare clicks and orders instead.

Published averages for online stores sit around 1% to 2% for campaigns: 1.69% in Klaviyo's 2026 data, 1.07% for e-commerce in MailerLite's, and 1.74% for ecommerce in Mailchimp's December 2023 data. Flows run higher; Klaviyo reports 5.58%.

Each provider measures its own customers, in its own time period, with its own formulas and bot filtering. Their customer mix differs too. Use them as a rough range and compare yourself to your own past results.

Google recommends staying below 0.10% and never reaching 0.30%. Yahoo asks bulk senders to stay below 0.3%.