CPG email marketing benchmarks 2026: what consumable brands earn per email

How I built these benchmarks (methodology)

Most email marketing benchmarks you'll find average thousands of accounts across every industry. That's useful for scale. It's less useful when you sell something people use up and reorder, because consumables live and die on the second order.

So this page uses data from the consumable brands I work with directly. Here's exactly what's in it:

• Main sample: 4 consumable brands, 2,897 campaigns, $17.7M in email revenue. Flow and campaign per-person numbers, the open vs click comparison, the unsubscribe finding, and the emoji and length findings come from here.
• Subject line sample: 7 brands, 2,821 campaigns. The "news beats brand voice" finding comes from here.
• Single-brand data points: a handful of numbers from individual client accounts, each labeled with a plain descriptor like "a snack brand" or "a fitness tech brand." These show what's possible in one account. They aren't averages.
• Email share of revenue: the roughly 32% portfolio average shown on my homepage, across the brands I work with.

The honest caveat: this is a small sample. Four brands can tell you a direction. They can't give you a decimal point to hold yourself to. Treat every number here as directional, and treat your own account's history as the benchmark that matters most.

"Per person" here means revenue per recipient: the revenue an email or flow was credited with, divided by the number of people who received it. If that's new to you, I explain it in revenue per recipient.

CPG email marketing benchmarks at a glance

Here are the per-recipient numbers from the 4-brand sample in one table.

And a few single-brand numbers that are worth knowing:

That last one is a tiny number of sends, so don't plan around $43. It's there to show how much weight the first welcome email can carry when the offer and timing are right.

Flow benchmarks: where the money actually is

Welcome series

Welcome email #1 earned more per person than anything else in the sample. About $4.50 per person, against about $0.10 each for emails #2 to #5.

That's why I tell founders to spend most of their welcome flow effort on email #1 and keep the welcome short. Get the offer, the product and the reason to buy right in that first send. The full playbook is in how to build a welcome email series.

Replenishment (reorder reminder)

Replenishment flows earned about $2.23 per person, about 28x the best campaign in the sample. And only 2 of the 4 brands had one built.

If your product runs out, build the reorder flow before anything else. One skincare brand's reorder reminder flow grew 496% in one month as new customers hit their reorder window. Setup details are in the Klaviyo replenishment flow guide.

Cart abandonment

Cart abandonment email #5 still earned about $0.25 per person, the same as email #3. If your cart flow stops at two or three emails, that's worth a look. In this sample, the later emails were still pulling their weight.

My rule: keep the welcome short, keep cart and winback long.

Winback

Winback email #3 earned about twice what email #1 did ($0.23 vs $0.11). The people you're trying to win back often need more than one nudge. More on that in how long a winback flow should be.

Back in stock

One snack brand doing about $650K a month earns about 1.7x its average per person on back-in-stock emails ($0.26 vs $0.15). When something sells out, the restock email is your biggest send of the month.

Flows vs campaigns overall

Flows can end up carrying most of the weight. After one skincare brand's flow system was rebuilt (welcome, post-purchase, reorder reminder, browse, window shopper, winback), flows went from 60% to 83% of its email revenue. Its email revenue went from $48,193 for all of 2025 to $203,777 in the first 7 months of 2026.

Campaign benchmarks: frequency, targeting and subject lines

Does sending more raise unsubscribes?

In the 4-brand sample, 3 of the 4 brands saw no rise in unsubscribes when they sent more. That's not a license to blast. It does mean the fear of sending is often bigger than the actual cost. I dig into it in does sending more emails increase unsubscribes.

Engaged segments vs full-list blasts

One fitness tech brand sent to an engaged segment of 7,145 people and earned $0.19 per person. A full-list blast to 49,475 earned $0.04. The blast reached about 7x as many people and earned less than a quarter as much per person.

Restocks and launches

Restock and launch emails are the outliers that make a month. A snack brand's restock email, "We're back baby!", made $48,771 from 30,498 people, its best campaign ever. Six different restock emails at that brand each made more than $16,000.

A haircare brand's new product launch email made $31,059 from 395 orders.

Content with no offer

Content warms people up, but somebody has to ask for the sale. A wellness brand (sleep) ran a month of all-educational sends with no offer, and campaign revenue went from $3,146 to $110, down 96.5%. A fitness tech brand sent 12 educational campaigns in one month, some with 6 to 10% click rates, and made $547 total.

Subject lines

From the 7-brand sample of 2,821 campaigns: news beats brand voice, and vague questions were the worst-performing pattern.

From the 4-brand sample, the "rules" flipped by audience:

• Emoji in subject lines helped two brands in the same category and hurt the other two.
• Subject lines of 40+ characters helped well-segmented lists.
• At one fitness tech brand, subject lines of 20 characters or fewer got more than 2x the clicks of 41 to 60 character lines.

My starting rules are under 50 characters, preview text of 80 to 100 characters, no fake "Re:" or "Fwd:", and pick winners by clicks. Then test on your own list, because your audience may flip them. More in email subject line best practices.

Which metric should you benchmark: opens, clicks or revenue?

In the 4-brand sample, click rate tracked revenue at 0.65 and open rate at 0.32. On a scale where 1 means "moves in lockstep with revenue" and 0 means "no relationship," clicks are useful and opens are weak. For one brand, more opens actually lined up with less money.

Part of the reason is Apple Mail Privacy Protection, which loads emails in the background. In our data it pushed open rates past 85% on some segments. That's why I judge every email by clicks, then by revenue per recipient. The full breakdown is in open rate vs click rate.

One more thing to check before you trust any benchmark: are clicks being tracked at all? Across my portfolio, about 20 sends showed opens and revenue but zero clicks. That meant tracking was broken, not that nobody clicked.

What percentage of revenue comes from email?

Across the brands I work with, about 32% of total revenue comes from email on average.

That number moves for reasons that have nothing to do with email quality. One subscription wellness brand's email share went from 41% to 53% in a month when store revenue fell 37% and new customers dropped from 1,657 to 223. Email didn't get better. Acquisition slowed, so email's slice of a smaller pie got bigger. A haircare brand went from 23% to 47% in its launch month.

How to calculate yours, and when a high number is a warning sign, is in what percentage of revenue should come from email.

How do these compare with Klaviyo's public benchmarks?

Klaviyo publishes its own 2026 benchmarks, drawn from over 183,000 Klaviyo customers across industries. A few numbers from that page:

• A "good" open rate of 31% for campaigns and 32.2% for flows.
• A "good" click rate of 1.69% for campaigns and 5.58% for flows.
• An order rate for food and beverage of 1.16% for campaigns and 1.79% for flows.
• Flows with average revenue per recipient that's nearly 18x higher than campaigns, and top 10% flows with revenue per recipient as high as $7.79.

Two things line up with what I see in our CPG sample. Flows beat campaigns by a wide margin per person, in their data and ours. And the best flow emails earn dollars per recipient, not cents.

Where I'd be careful: their sample spans every kind of store and ours is 4 consumable brands. And any open rate benchmark, theirs or mine, is muddied by Apple's auto-opens. Use theirs to see where you sit across the market, and use per-person numbers like the ones above to see where your money is hiding.

How to benchmark your own account

Here's how I'd set it up if you want to compare your account against this page:

1. Pick a window. The last 90 days is a good start. Avoid a window that's mostly Black Friday unless that's what you're studying.
2. Pull revenue per recipient for each flow email. Not just the flow. Email #1 vs email #5 is where the story is.
3. Pull click rate and revenue per recipient for each campaign. Sort by revenue per recipient, not opens.
4. Split engaged sends from full-list sends. Compare them per person.
5. Calculate email's share of total revenue. Email-attributed revenue in Klaviyo divided by total revenue in Shopify, same dates.
6. Look for gaps. No replenishment flow, a short cart flow, or a welcome email #1 that earns about the same as #3 are the usual suspects.

If you want a structured way to do this, the Klaviyo audit checklist walks through it.

Where these numbers come from

The pooled numbers come from 4 consumable brands I work with (2,897 campaigns, $17.7M in email revenue) and, for subject lines, 7 brands (2,821 campaigns). Single-brand numbers come from individual client accounts and are labeled that way. The 32% figure is the portfolio average shown on my homepage. It's a small sample, so all of it is directional.

How to cite this

Source: Bardown Digital, CPG Email Benchmarks 2026.

FAQ

WRITTEN BY Jack White

Founder of Bardown Digital, a Chicago-based Klaviyo email and retention agency for Shopify brands. He's worked with brands doing $500K to $100M a year, with $100M+ in email-attributed revenue across them.

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