sourced, dated, checked
email marketing statistics, with the receipts.
Most statistics pages are a pile of numbers with no source, no sample size, and no date. This one is the opposite. Every figure below names the organisation that produced it, how much data it sits on, and when it was published, so you can check it in one click.
The last section does the part nobody does: it lists the famous email statistics that have no traceable source at all, including two that appear in almost every agency pitch.
last checked 28 July 2026campaigns against automated flows
This is the single most useful comparison in ecommerce email, and two platforms with separate datasets land in the same place. Scheduled campaigns are a small slice of revenue spread over a lot of sends. Automated flows, the messages triggered by what a customer actually did, are a tiny slice of sends carrying most of the money.
| Metric | Average | Top 10% |
|---|---|---|
| Campaign open rate | 31% | 45.1% |
| Campaign click rate | 1.69% | 3.38% |
| Campaign placed order rate | 0.16% | 0.36% |
| Flow click rate | 5.58% | 10.48% |
| Flow placed order rate | 2.11% | 4.3% |
| Share of email revenue from flows | ~41% | from 5.3% of sends |
Source: Klaviyo, 2026 email marketing benchmarks, published 24 February 2026, based on data from more than 183,000 brands. klaviyo.com/uk/blog/email-marketing-benchmarks-open-click-and-conversion-rates
A flow placed order rate of 2.11 percent against 0.16 percent for campaigns is a factor of thirteen on the metric that pays your invoices. That gap is why a brand with a decent list and no flows is usually leaving more on the table than a brand with flows and a small list.
the same finding from a second platform
Independent confirmation matters more than a bigger number. Omnisend ran its own 2025 data and found the same pattern in different units.
| Finding | Figure |
|---|---|
| Revenue per automated email sent | $2.87 |
| Revenue per scheduled campaign email sent | $0.18 |
| Automations as a share of all email sends | 2% |
| Share of email revenue those automations produced | 30% |
| Click to conversion, 2024 against 2025 | 5.9% → 9% |
| Best converting automation type (back in stock) | 6.46% |
Source: Omnisend, 2026 Ecommerce Marketing Report, covering the 2025 calendar year, based on 27 billion emails, 321 million SMS and 458 million push notifications from more than 150,000 brands. omnisend.com/resources/reports/2026-ecommerce-marketing-report/
Both platforms have an obvious interest in email looking good, and both count revenue with last-click attribution, which flatters the last message a customer touched. What survives that caveat is the ratio between the two send types, because the same bias applies to both. A sixteen-fold difference per send does not come from attribution alone.
the checkout number everybody quotes
Cart abandonment is the one statistic almost every ecommerce article cites, usually as a round number with no source. The traceable version comes from the Baymard Institute, which does not run a survey but averages the published studies.
| Metric | Figure | Basis |
|---|---|---|
| Average documented cart abandonment rate | 70.22% | average of 50 studies |
Source: Baymard Institute, cart abandonment rate statistics, last updated 22 September 2025, calculated as the average of 50 separate studies. baymard.com/lists/cart-abandonment-rate
Read it as an order of magnitude, not a target. It mixes grocery with furniture and impulse buys with considered purchases, and the studies behind it span years. Your own rate over a full quarter is the only version of this number that should change what you build.
where the retention argument actually comes from
Every retention pitch in the world traces back to one 1990 article in the Harvard Business Review. It is worth reading what it really says, because the version in circulation has grown in the retelling.
Source: Frederick F. Reichheld and W. Earl Sasser Jr., "Zero Defections: Quality Comes to Services", Harvard Business Review, September to October 1990, pages 105 to 111. hbr.org/1990/09/zero-defections-quality-comes-to-services
The original reports that cutting the defection rate by 5 percent raised profits by 85 percent in one bank's branch system, 50 percent in an insurance brokerage and 30 percent in an auto service chain. Three named service businesses, measured 36 years ago, none of them ecommerce. The mechanism holds up well and the specific percentages do not transfer to your shop. Anyone who quotes it as a promise for a Shopify brand is quoting a bank from 1990.
statistics to handle with care
These four appear in almost every agency deck and in most statistics roundups. We went looking for the primary source of each. Here is what is actually behind them.
"Email returns 42 dollars for every dollar spent."
The traceable published figure is 38 to 1, from Litmus in October 2018, based on responses from roughly 400 marketers who were asked to estimate their own return. litmus.com/press Nobody audited those estimates. The revenue side is usually last-click, so every sale a customer would have made anyway lands on email's ledger, and the cost side is usually the software subscription with no agency fee, no design time and no salaries. Fine as an argument for a budget, useless as a forecast.
"A 5 percent lift in retention means 25 to 95 percent more profit."
The source is real, the range is not. Reichheld and Sasser's 1990 article reports 85 percent, 50 percent and 30 percent for three specific service businesses. The 95 percent upper bound belongs to later retellings, not to the article being cited.
"The average ecommerce repeat purchase rate is 27 to 30 percent."
We could not find a published dataset behind this. It circulates between vendor blogs, each citing the last one. It is also close to meaningless as an average, because repeat rate is driven by what you sell: a coffee subscription and a mattress brand are not on the same scale, and no single average covers both. Measure your own rate, then compare it to your own previous quarter.
"Acquiring a customer costs five times more than keeping one."
Quoted everywhere, attributed to nobody. We went looking for a primary study and found only articles citing other articles. The underlying idea is sound, since an existing customer needs no ad spend to reach. The multiplier is folklore, and it changes completely with your margin and channel mix.
how we picked these
Four rules, applied to every number on the page. It has to come from the organisation that produced the data, not from an article about it. It has to state a sample size. It has to carry a date. And if the source has a commercial interest in the result, that gets said out loud rather than buried.
That filter threw out most of what a search for email marketing statistics returns. What is left is short, which is the point. We would rather publish six numbers you can defend in a meeting than sixty you cannot.
common questions
Klaviyo's 2026 benchmarks, drawn from more than 183,000 brands, put the average ecommerce email campaign open rate at 31 percent, with the top 10 percent of senders at 45.1 percent. Open rate is the weakest metric on this page: Apple Mail Privacy Protection has been pre-loading images since 2021, which inflates opens for anyone with a large Apple audience. Click rate and placed order rate are the numbers worth optimising.
Klaviyo reports that automated flows generated close to 41 percent of email revenue from 5.3 percent of sends in 2026. Omnisend, analysing 27 billion emails from about 150,000 brands in 2025, reports a similar shape: automations were 2 percent of sends and 30 percent of email-driven revenue, earning 2.87 US dollars per send against 0.18 for scheduled campaigns. Two independent platforms, same conclusion: the automated messages do most of the work.
70.22 percent, calculated by the Baymard Institute as the average of 50 separate studies, last updated on 22 September 2025. It is a meta-average across very different shops, so treat it as an order of magnitude rather than a target. Your own checkout rate, measured over a full quarter, is the only number that should drive a decision.
Treat it as marketing, not measurement. The widely quoted ROI figures come from self-reported surveys run by companies that sell email software. Litmus published 38 to 1 in October 2018 based on responses from roughly 400 marketers. Nobody audited those responses, most attribution behind them is last-click, and the cost side usually counts the software subscription and nothing else. Use it to argue for a budget if you must, never to forecast a return.
Yes. Every figure on this page links to the organisation that produced it, so cite that source first. If the framing or the source-checking is what you are quoting, cite this page as: real. Marketing (2026), Email marketing statistics for ecommerce, workwithreal.com/email-marketing-statistics/. We are happy to be quoted and to answer follow-up questions by email.
citing this page
Journalists and analysts are welcome to use anything here. Cite the original organisation first, every one of them is linked above. If the framing or the source-checking is what you are quoting, this page works as:
real. Marketing (2026). Email marketing statistics for ecommerce. https://workwithreal.com/email-marketing-statistics/
Questions, or a number you want checked before you publish it? Write to info@workwithreal.com and you will get a straight answer, including "we don't know" where that is the honest one.
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