What's a good click rate for ecommerce email?

What is a good click rate for email?

Here's what the two biggest public benchmarks say right now.

Klaviyo's figures come from its benchmarks page, which says it's built on over 183,000 Klaviyo customers. Mailchimp's come from campaigns sent to at least 1,000 subscribers, and Mailchimp says the data was last updated in December 2023, so treat it as a second opinion rather than this year's number.

The ecommerce answer lines up across both: a normal campaign click rate is somewhere around 1.7%. I'd call anything over 3% on campaigns strong.

Mailchimp also lists vitamin supplements as its lowest-clicking industry at 1.19%. If you sell supplements and you're around there, you're not broken. You're in a category where people click less.

Why do flows click so much more than campaigns?

Because the person asked for it. A campaign goes to a list that, on any given day, mostly isn't shopping. A flow email goes to someone who just signed up, just left their cart, or just ran out of product.

That gap shows up in revenue too. Across 4 consumable brands I work with, welcome email #1 earns about $4.50 per person, and replenishment flows earn about $2.23 per person, roughly 28x the best campaign. So don't compare a flow's click rate to a campaign benchmark, and don't judge your campaigns against your best flow.

Why should you look at click rate instead of open rate?

Because clicks track money and opens don't, at least not anymore.

Across 4 consumable brands and 2,897 campaigns, I measured how closely each metric moved with revenue. Click rate came in at 0.65. Open rate came in at 0.32. On that scale, 1 means the two move in lockstep and 0 means no relationship. For one brand, open rate was actually negative: more opens, less money.

A big part of that is Apple Mail Privacy Protection, which loads emails in the background. In our data it pushed open rates past 85% on some segments. Mailchimp's benchmark page makes the same point: open rate accuracy may be affected by Apple's privacy changes. I break this down fully in open rate vs click rate.

When is a high click rate a bad sign?

When nobody buys. A click rate is a signal, not a result.

Two examples from the brands I work with:

• A strength training gear brand sent a restock email that hit a 0.40% click rate, double every other send that month, and made $0. The tracking was broken. Across the portfolio, about 20 sends showed opens and revenue but zero clicks, which also meant broken tracking, not an email nobody liked.
• A fitness tech brand sent 12 educational campaigns in one month. Some had 6% to 10% click rates. All 12 together made $547.

So a high click rate with no sales usually means one of two things. Either something broke between the click and the checkout (a dead link, a sold-out product, a landing page problem), or the email gave people something interesting to read and no reason to buy. Content warms people up, but somebody has to ask for the sale. If this sounds familiar, I go through the checklist in email clicks but no sales.

How do you calculate email click rate?

Mailchimp defines click rate as total clicks divided by emails delivered. So if 10,000 emails are delivered and 170 people click, your click rate is 1.7%.

Two things to watch when you compare numbers:

• Unique vs total clicks. One person clicking five times can count once or five times depending on the report. Benchmarks are usually based on unique clicks. Make sure you're comparing the same thing.
• Click rate vs click-to-open rate. Click-to-open divides clicks by opens, not deliveries. Because opens are inflated, click-to-open looks worse than it is. Stick to click rate.

How do I improve my email click rate?

In the order I'd try them:

1. Send to people who are paying attention. A fitness tech brand I work with sent to an engaged segment of 7,145 people and earned $0.19 per person. The blast to 49,475 earned $0.04 per person. Smaller, warmer sends lift click rate and revenue per person at the same time. More in email segmentation for ecommerce.
2. Give one clear thing to click. One product, one offer, one button. If you want people to click, don't make them choose.
3. Make the email worth clicking. News beats brand voice. Across 2,821 campaigns from 7 brands, news-style subject lines beat brand-voice ones, and vague questions did worst. One fitness tech brand's subject lines of 20 characters or fewer got more than 2x the clicks of 41 to 60 character lines. That's one brand's audience, so test it on yours. See email subject line best practices.
4. Test the right thing for the right metric. I judge a content or button test on clicks, a subject line test on opens, an offer test on revenue, and a segment test on revenue per recipient. Repeat a test across about five campaign sends before you treat it as a rule.
5. Click every link before you send. It's boring. It's also how you avoid a $0 restock email.

What should I track next to click rate?

Click rate tells you whether the email worked as an email. These tell you whether it worked as a business:

• Revenue per recipient. The number I sort every campaign by. See revenue per recipient.
• Placed order rate. Klaviyo's 2026 benchmarks list order rates by industry, for example 1.18% for campaigns and 1.79% for flows in sporting goods.
• Unsubscribe rate. A high click rate that comes with a spike in unsubscribes isn't a win. Here's what's normal: good unsubscribe rate.

For the full set of numbers from the consumable brands I work with, see CPG email marketing benchmarks.

Where these numbers come from

The open vs click, welcome and replenishment numbers come from 4 consumable brands I work with: 2,897 campaigns and $17.7M in email revenue. The subject line numbers come from 2,821 campaigns across 7 brands. It's a small sample, so treat it as directional.

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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