Email Marketing Benchmarks 2026: Open Rates and Click Rates

Automated flow emails outperform one-time campaigns by more than 3x on click rate in 2026 — 5.58% versus 1.69% — and 64% of consumer subscribers now use Apple Mail Privacy Protection, which means open rate is quietly becoming an unreliable metric across the entire industry, according to Klaviyo’s 2026 ecommerce benchmark data (183,000+ brands) and Mailchimp’s cross-industry benchmarks.

Campaigns vs. Flows: The Gap Is Real and It’s Growing

Klaviyo’s 2026 data, drawn from over 183,000 ecommerce brands, splits performance cleanly by email type:

Metric	One-Time Campaigns	Automated Flows
Open Rate	31.0%	40–50%+ (varies by flow)
Click Rate	1.69%	5.58%
Placed Order Rate	0.16%	2.11%

The placed-order-rate gap is the most telling number here: flows convert into actual purchases at more than 13x the rate of one-off campaigns. Within flows, performance varies further by type — Welcome Series emails run 45–60%+ open rate, Post-Purchase flows run 50–65%, Abandoned Checkout runs 40–55%, and Back in Stock alerts run 45–60%. Source: Klaviyo 2026 ecommerce benchmarks, via Threadpoint.

Cross-Industry Benchmarks (Mailchimp)

Mailchimp’s own benchmark page — based on billions of tracked emails across its customer base, from solo entrepreneurs to Fortune 500 companies — breaks performance out by broader industry category. Note this data is dated to December 2023, the most recent update on Mailchimp’s live benchmark page as of this writing:

Industry	Open Rate	Click Rate	Unsubscribe Rate
Nonprofits	40.04%	3.27%	0.18%
Education & Training	35.64%	3.02%	0.18%
Business & Finance	31.35%	2.78%	0.15%
E-commerce	29.81%	1.74%	0.19%
All Users (Overall)	35.63%	2.62%	0.22%

Nonprofits post the highest open and click rates of any category Mailchimp tracks, consistent with donor lists being smaller, higher-affinity, and more permission-based than typical commercial lists. E-commerce sits at the bottom on both metrics — a large volume of low-engagement promotional sends pulls the average down, which is also why Klaviyo’s ecommerce-specific figures (31.0% open, 1.69% click for campaigns) sit close to Mailchimp’s e-commerce row despite coming from a different dataset and year. Source: Mailchimp Email Marketing Benchmarks.

Why Open Rate Is Becoming a Less Trustworthy Metric

Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection (MPP) pre-downloads email content — including the invisible tracking pixel used to register an “open” — the moment an email lands in an Apple Mail inbox, regardless of whether the recipient ever actually looks at it. Roughly 64% of B2C subscribers now use Apple Mail Privacy Protection, according to Klaviyo’s data, which means a majority of “opens” on typical consumer lists may not reflect real human attention at all. Click rate, click-to-open rate, and placed-order rate aren’t affected by this and are the more defensible metrics going forward — open rate is still worth tracking directionally over time, but shouldn’t be treated as a precise engagement number anymore.

Send Frequency and List Health Interact With Every Metric Above

None of the benchmarks above hold steady if a list isn’t actively maintained. Unsubscribe rates in the 0.15–0.22% range shown by Mailchimp assume reasonably engaged, opted-in audiences — a list that hasn’t been pruned of long-dormant subscribers will drag down open and click rates simultaneously (inflating the apparent size of the audience while shrinking the share that ever engages) and can also affect inbox placement, since mailbox providers increasingly weight sender reputation on engagement ratios rather than raw list size. This is one reason the flows-vs-campaigns gap is so large in practice: flow emails trigger off a specific recent action (a signup, a cart abandonment, a purchase), so they’re inherently reaching a freshly-engaged subset of the list, while broadcast campaigns go to the full list regardless of how recently any given subscriber last opened anything — meaning part of the campaign-vs-flow performance gap is really an engaged-vs-stale-audience gap wearing a different label.

What This Means for Email Program Priorities

The 13x gap in placed-order rate between flows and campaigns is the single most actionable number in this data: a well-built set of automated flows (welcome, abandoned checkout, post-purchase, win-back) does more revenue work per email sent than broadcast campaigns, yet many brands still treat flows as a set-and-forget afterthought while investing most of their creative and testing effort into campaigns. Klaviyo’s own guidance that flow revenue should represent 50–60% of total email revenue is a useful target to benchmark an existing program against — if flows are contributing meaningfully less than that, the highest-leverage fix is usually there, not in the next campaign subject line test. It’s also worth checking revenue per recipient, which Klaviyo flags should sit above $0.12 for a healthy program; a number well below that threshold on a list that hasn’t been actively cleaned in the last 6–12 months is often a sign of accumulated unengaged subscribers dragging down every other metric on this page simultaneously, including deliverability itself.

Sources

• Klaviyo 2026 Ecommerce Email Benchmarks, based on 183,000+ brands, via Threadpoint.
• Mailchimp — Email Marketing Benchmarks by Industry, data as of December 2023.