Email marketing conversion rates: 2026 benchmarks by email type

How many people click and buy from marketing email? Click rates, conversion rates and revenue per recipient for campaigns and automated flows, with the 2018 numbers for comparison.

First published 2018-09-17Updated 2026-11-06

Short answer (2026): In ecommerce, a typical promotional email gets clicks from about 1.7% of recipients, and about 9% of the people who click go on to buy. Automated emails such as abandoned cart and welcome flows do several times better: a 5% to 6% click rate and $2 to $7 in revenue per recipient. Automations are about 2% of the emails stores send but bring in about 30% of email revenue.

Conversion rate in email can mean three different things, so it’s worth being precise before comparing numbers:

• Click rate: clicks divided by emails delivered.
• Click-to-conversion rate: orders divided by clicks.
• Placed order rate: orders divided by emails delivered.

Most benchmark reports also give revenue per recipient, which combines all three and is the best single number to compare email types.

What the data showed in 2018

The first version of this page summarized a 2018 Marketing Insider Group article that pulled together the benchmarks of the day:

• Mailchimp’s average across all industries was a 21.80% open rate and a 2.78% click rate.
• Remarkety measured how many ecommerce recipients placed an order within three days of opening or clicking. Newsletters converted about 1%, while abandoned cart emails and order follow-ups converted about 5%.
• Email was said to return $44 for every dollar spent. That figure came from industry surveys and gets repeated everywhere, but it isn’t something you can check or apply to your own business.

The 2018 article also quoted a “760% increase in email revenue from segmented campaigns”. I couldn’t trace that figure to any original study, so I’ve dropped it.

Open rates stopped meaning much in 2021

In September 2021 Apple started Mail Privacy Protection. Apple Mail now downloads the images in every email in the background, including the invisible tracking pixel that counts an open, whether or not the person reads it. Since a large share of email is read in Apple Mail, open rates jumped across the industry and stopped telling you who actually read your email.

That’s why the 2026 benchmarks below focus on clicks, orders and revenue. If a report leads with open rates, treat them as inflated.

Campaigns versus automated flows

Klaviyo’s benchmarks cover more than 183,000 of its customers. Flows are automated emails triggered by what someone does, like signing up, leaving a cart or placing an order. Campaigns are the newsletters and promotions sent to a list.

For context, Mailchimp’s benchmark page, last updated with December 2023 data, gives a 2.62% average click rate across all its users and 1.74% for ecommerce.

Omnisend’s 2026 report, based on 2025 data from 150,000 brands and 27 billion emails, shows the same gap in revenue terms:

Omnisend also found that click-to-conversion rose from 5.9% to 9% between 2024 and 2025. People clicked less, but the ones who clicked were more likely to buy. Abandoned cart and welcome emails produced 76% of all orders from automations.

Benchmarks by email type

Klaviyo’s October 2026 report on abandoned cart flows, based on more than 110,000 customers, compares the main automated emails:

The top 10% of brands roughly double those figures. Their abandoned cart emails earn $13.70 per recipient.

The order matches 2018: the closer an email is to a purchase someone already started, the better it converts. A newsletter interrupts. An abandoned cart email reminds.

What moves email conversion rates

Build the automations before optimizing campaigns. If you only have time for three, set up abandoned cart, welcome and browse abandonment. They take a few hours, run on their own, and on these numbers earn many times more per email than a campaign.

Get delivery right. Since February 2024 Gmail and Yahoo require bulk senders to authenticate their email with SPF, DKIM and DMARC, offer one-click unsubscribe, and keep spam complaints low. Google’s guideline is a spam rate under 0.3%. If your emails land in spam, nothing else on this list matters.

Segment by behavior. Recent buyers, people who browsed a category and people who haven’t opened in six months should not get the same email. Sending less to unengaged subscribers also protects deliverability.

Make one action obvious. One main call to action, a button big enough to tap on a phone, and a landing page that continues the email’s offer. Most email is read on phones, so check every template on one.

Measure with holdouts. Email platforms usually count an order as email revenue if it happens within a few days of an open or click, even if the person would have bought anyway. For important flows, hold back a small random group that doesn’t get the email and compare their purchase rate. That’s the real lift.

Sources

1. Johanna Rivard, "Email Marketing Conversion Rate Comparison", Marketing Insider Group, 2018, the article the original version of this page was based on. marketinginsidergroup.com
2. Klaviyo, "Email benchmarks", 2026, data from more than 183,000 customers. klaviyo.com
3. Klaviyo, "Abandoned cart benchmarks", 2026-10-02, data from more than 110,000 customers. klaviyo.com
4. Omnisend, "2026 Ecommerce Marketing Report", 2025 data from 150,000 brands. omnisend.com
5. Mailchimp, "Email marketing benchmarks", data as of December 2023. mailchimp.com
6. Apple, announcement of Mail Privacy Protection, 2021-06-07. apple.com
7. Google, "Email sender guidelines". support.google.com