Email conversion rate benchmarks for CPG brands: what a good placed order rate looks like

This is for founders of consumable brands (food, beverage, supplements, skincare, wellness) who opened their Klaviyo reports, saw a placed order rate, and want to know whether it's good.

What is email conversion rate in ecommerce?

In Klaviyo it's called placed order rate. Klaviyo's analytics glossary defines it as the number of unique recipients who placed an order attributed to a message within the attribution window, divided by the messages delivered.

Two parts of that definition matter more than people think:

• Unique recipients. Someone who buys twice from one email counts once.
• Attributed. It's not "people who clicked and bought." By default, Klaviyo uses a 5-day window for email opens and 5 days for email clicks, and an open inside the window can get the credit. So an order from someone who opened your email and bought from an Instagram ad four days later can still show up as a conversion.

Check how attribution is set up before you trust any conversion number. More on that in Klaviyo attribution.

You can also change which metric a report treats as the conversion. Klaviyo lets each user pick a conversion metric for campaign and flow reports, and that choice is saved per user. If two people on your team are looking at different conversion numbers, check that first.

What's a good email conversion rate for ecommerce?

Here are Klaviyo's 2026 average order rates by industry, from over 183,000 Klaviyo customers. Klaviyo uses "conversion rate" and "order rate" interchangeably on that page.

For a CPG brand, the two rows that matter are food and beverage and health and beauty. Klaviyo doesn't break out supplements or wellness on its own, so health and beauty is the closest fit for those.

What jumps out: the spread is tight. Every industry lands between about 1% and 1.3% for campaigns. So if your campaigns convert at 0.3%, it's not your category. Something in the account needs a look.

Why are Omnisend's conversion benchmarks so much lower?

Omnisend's 2026 report, built on its 2025 data from 27,000+ brands, puts the average campaign conversion rate at 0.08%. Food and drink is 0.15%, health is 0.12%, and beauty and fitness is 0.07%.

That's more than ten times lower than Klaviyo's numbers. Omnisend doesn't publish a formula for its conversion rate on that page, so I can't tell you exactly why the gap is that big. Different platforms, different customers and different counting rules will all move the number.

The takeaway is simple: benchmark against the platform you're on. If you send from Klaviyo, use Klaviyo's table. A Klaviyo placed order rate of 0.9% isn't "ten times better than average" just because Omnisend's average is 0.08%.

Where the two reports do agree is direction. Omnisend says automations converted at 1.49% vs 0.08% for campaigns, roughly 19x. Klaviyo says flow placed order rates are 13x higher than campaigns.

What's a good conversion rate for flows like welcome and abandoned cart?

Flows convert better because they reach people at a moment that matters: they just signed up, just left a cart, or just ran out.

Klaviyo's blog on placed order rate, citing its benchmarks report, gave these averages:

• Abandoned cart: 3.33%
• Welcome series: 2.32%
• Browse abandonment: 0.95%
• Post-purchase: 0.54%

Omnisend's 2026 report breaks out its automations this way:

• Back in stock: 6.72%
• Shipping confirmation: 2.19%
• Welcome: 2.11%
• Abandoned cart: 1.72%
• Cross-sell: 0.87%
• Customer reactivation: 0.54%

Same caveat as before: don't mix the two lists. But the order is useful. Back in stock, cart and welcome sit at the top on both platforms.

That lines up with what I see in revenue per person across the 4 consumable brands I pulled for my CPG email marketing benchmarks. Welcome email #1 earned about $4.50 per person, while emails #2 to #5 earned about $0.10 each. Replenishment flows earned about $2.23 per person, about 28x the best campaign. Conversion rates tell you how many people bought. Those per-person numbers tell you where the money is.

If you're missing any of those high-converting flows, start with Klaviyo flows for CPG brands and the Klaviyo back in stock emails guide.

Should I benchmark conversion rate, click rate or revenue per recipient?

All three, in that order of trust: clicks, then revenue per recipient, then conversion rate as a cross-check.

Here's why. Across 4 consumable brands and 2,897 campaigns, click rate tracked revenue at 0.65 and open rate at just 0.32. Clicks are the cleanest signal that someone wanted what you sent. I break that down in open rate vs click rate.

Conversion rate counts buyers, not dollars. Two emails can both convert at 1%, and one can earn five times the other because of order size or who it went to. That's why revenue per recipient is the number I'd put next to every conversion rate.

Audience matters just as much. One sports training 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. A bigger, colder list drags your conversion rate down even when the email itself is fine. See email segmentation for ecommerce for how to build those segments.

Why is my email conversion rate low?

Start by checking whether the number is real. A strength training gear brand's restock email hit a 0.40% click rate, double its other sends, and made $0. Separately, about 20 sends across my accounts showed opens and revenue but zero clicks. That wasn't nobody clicking. Tracking was broken.

So before you rewrite anything, run through this:

1. Check tracking. Are clicks and orders being recorded? Do Shopify orders show up as Placed Order events in Klaviyo?
2. Check the conversion metric. Is the report set to Placed Order, or something else?
3. Check attribution settings. A short window or a changed setting will drop your rate overnight.
4. Check who you sent to. Full-list blasts convert lower than engaged sends.
5. Check the click-to-order gap. If people click but don't buy, the problem is often the landing page, price or offer, not the email.

That last one is common enough that I wrote a full post on it: email clicks but no sales. Klaviyo's own advice for improving placed order rate points the same way: segment better, send primary links to product pages, A/B test, fix the on-site experience and tune your automations.

How do I find my placed order rate in Klaviyo?

Open Campaigns and pick a conversion metric from the dropdown above the list. If the column is hidden, turn on Conversion metric under List settings, then Customize columns. For flows, open the flow, click an email, choose View details in the Performance section and pick the metric there.

For a cleaner comparison, pull 90 days of campaigns and sort by revenue per recipient. Then look at placed order rate next to it. The Klaviyo audit checklist walks through the rest.

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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