Do you know your Klaviyo Email Benchmarks?

Tackling the world of Email Marketing is a challenge in itself. From copy and visuals to segments and flows, there are many components in this type of marketing. But once all of this in place, how do you evaluate your email performance? Do you compare the number of results to each campaign or do you use Klaviyo’s reporting dashboard?

Klaviyo has really taken the time to create a reporting dashboard to help you assess the performance of your emails but when you want to compare their performance to others in the industry what can you do? The solution: benchmarks! In this blog, we’re going to talk you through these metrics, what can affect them and how you can use these in your Email Marketing plan.

Klaviyo Benchmarks

What are benchmarks?

A benchmark, by dictionary definition, is a standard or point of reference against which things are compared. In this case, our Email Marketing benchmarks will be an average cost or percentage seen across all Klaviyo Emails.

Benchmarks can also be defined by industry. For example, the apparel industry will have different benchmarks compared to the B2B industry. For this blog, we’re going to focus on all industries and the E-commerce industry to keep things simple. But if you want to find these benchmarks for your industry, there are loads of resources online or checkout Klaviyo’s blog.

Klaviyo Email Benchmarks

When you look at Benchmarks online, you’ll often see there are 5 key metrics for evaluating email performance: Open Rate, Click Through Rate (CTR), Conversion Rate (CR), Revenue per Recipient (RPR) and Average Order Value (AOV).

Open Rate and Click Through Rate are commonly used by marketers as it shows how many people are opening and clicking on their emails. But if you’re looking to see how profitable your emails are Conversion Rate and Average Order Value are the way to go. When you choose your benchmarks, think about what’s best for your objectives, email types and email goals.

First of all, it’s important to mention because Klaviyo has both Campaigns and Flows with different end goals they’ll all have different benchmarks. Let’s break these down further.

Campaign Industry Performance

Getting subscribers to convert in a campaign can be hard work because we can safely assume they’re also being sent campaigns from others. Campaigns are less targeted than automated emails but are good if you want to send out your monthly newsletter or blog to your whole mailing list.

In Klaviyo, you can choose to send a campaign to a particular group of people, so it’s a good idea to keep an eye on this and set up segments for those who are engaged with your content so you’re sending emails to those who really want it.

For comparison to your own results, here are the benchmarks across all industries:

Open Rate - 35%
Click Through Rate - 5.45%
Conversion Rate - 1.41%
Revenue per Recipient - $1.17
Average Order Value - $99.80

Flow Industry Performance

Flows are a series of emails sent to a subscriber based on a trigger or event. For example, if someone signs up to your mailing list, they may be added to a Welcome Series flow. It’s easier to convert subscribers with a flow because they’ll only be sent an email if they meet the requirement for the trigger. This means they’ll only be sent emails that you want them to receive.

Klaviyo Benchmarks

On Klaviyo there are 4 main flows: Abandon Cart, Win-Backs, Welcome Series and Browse Abandonment. Because each of these flows has a different purpose, each one also has its own set of benchmarks. Let’s break each of these down:

Abandoned Carts

These are usually one of the first flows to be set up by an e-commerce store because of the significant impact they tend to make on the revenue of a store. If a member of a mailing list adds to cart, and then abandons it, these flows are designed to recapture the potential purchase. The subscriber has already shown high interest in your products, therefore, these flows are highly targeted, timely and have conversion rate 3x greater than other flows on average. It’s no wonder these are popular when we want to analyse our emails.

Here are the benchmarks across all industries:

Open Rate - 39.17%
Click Through Rate - 7.74%
Conversion Rate - 2.89%
Revenue per Recipient - $2.72
Average Order Value - $94.65

Win-Backs

These flows are designed to re-engage customers who have been inactive for a period of time. Popular emails for these flows include keeping people up to date with new products or providing incentive to purchase with a discount on their next purchase. They’re a critical part of the customer lifecycle and allow you to both win back purchasers from the past and regularly cleanse your subscribers.

The averages across all industries are:

Open Rate - 28.10%
Click Through Rate - 4.02%
Conversion Rate - 0.49%
Revenue per Recipient - $0.37
Average Order Value - $79.12

Welcome Series

When a person signs up to your mailing list, what’s the first thing you’re going to send them? Most of the time they’ll be sent a welcome email. With impressive conversion and open rates, a welcome series is a great way to start your engagement with new subscribers and reach them when they’re most interested. Whilst it’s tempting to simply send an email detailing as much as you can about specific products, research has shown that providing a series of emails that educates the customer about your brand, values and products are most effective for conversion.

The averages across all industries are:

Open Rate - 33.22%
Click Through Rate - 5.10%
Conversion Rate - 1.33%
Revenue per Recipient - $1.18
Average Order Value - $93.01

Browse Abandonment

Alongside your abandon cart flows you could consider targeting people who have abandoned their browsing. Sending an email flow to those who have left your store without purchasing could be a smart way to recapture some of those potential sales, especially when they have an average open rate of over 50%. These flows are great for giving your subscribers a nudge in the right direction.

The averages across all industries are:

Open Rate - 50.54%
Click Through Rate - 8.72%
Conversion Rate - 1.29%
Revenue per Recipient - $1.09
Average Order Value - $84.65

How to Improve Email Performance

There are a number of factors that can influence your email marketing and put you above or below these benchmarks. The good news is these are all factors you can change and test with your emails. Klaviyo even has the option to create two variations of the same email so you can easily test these changes. Here are our top 5 factors to consider:

1. Subject Lines

When you open an email what’s the first thing you read? The subject line! Subject lines are really important when it comes to email marketing. Not only do they need to tell subscribers what the email is about, they also need to entice them to read the email.

A best practice is to keep your subject lines short and sweet. Subject lines that regularly outperform the benchmarks often have a time element as well like “Uh oh… it’s all over in 4 hours” or “Hurry! Sale ends at midnight”. Adding a sense of urgency or intrigue is a sure fire way to get your subscribers opening your emails. Also, why not experiment with Emojis and Exclamation points? You can add excitement and eye-catching content to your emails just from your subject line.

2. Personalisation

Another way you can improve your email performance is by adding a personalisation. To make your emails even more relevant to your subscribers you can pull specific information about them like their name, country or purchases to personalise your emails.

One of our favourite personalisations to use is Dynamic tags. They offer a more granular way to personalise email content but keep it simple at the same time. By using these tags we can personally address our emails with our subscriber's first name. To do this in your text box you can either type {{ first_name|default:'' }} or you can select the ‘Insert Property’ drop-down menu and scroll until you find ‘First Name’. You’ll also see in the example below we use ‘there’ as our default option. This means if a subscriber hasn’t had a first name added, they will be greeted with ‘there’ instead of a blank space.

Klaviyo Benchmarks

3. Tailored Recommendations

A good way to engage subscribers with your products is by adding a quick link to them in your email with a product block. When you’ve integrated Klaviyo with your Shopify store you can select products from your catalogue. You can either show your best selling products or go one step further and personalised them.

Personalised recommendations show your subscribers products that they have either shown interest in or have bought something similar. These personal recommendations help tailor your emails to your subscribers showing them the most relevant content possible. To do this in Klaviyo, either add or open your product block and select ‘Populate from Feed’ for your content. You can then either choose yes or no to turn personalised recommendation on or off.

Klaviyo Benchmarks

4. Mobile Optimisation

An element of email marketing you can’t fully control is how your emails display on different devices. For example, your email design might look great on your desktop but on mobile could look disproportionate. Thankfully Klaviyo has a solution to this.

Not only can you set text and heading sizes to be different sizes on mobile, Klaviyo also has a design function that allows you to make certain elements of your email show on desktop or mobile. Take a look at the example below.

Klaviyo Benchmarks

The email on the left is how Blend’s email shows on desktop, but look at how different it is on the right. The title is way too big for a mobile phone and makes the email long and hard to read. Instead, we resolve this by having two separate titles for mobile and desktop.

Klaviyo Benchmarks

Klaviyo makes this easy by having a ‘Show On’ drop down at the bottom of the Text Block ‘Block Styles’ tab. We can then create a title that uses a smaller font size and shows separately on Mobile, just like below:

Klaviyo Benchmarks

Simple mobile optimisation will allow your emails to look great on both desktop and mobile and therefore may increase their performance.

5. Segments

Unlike traditional subscriber lists, segments are a way of defining a group of subscribers to a set of conditions. Because segments are dynamic they can change and grow to include people who meet these conditions. You can vastly improve the results of your email marketing by segmenting your subscriber list as you’ll only send emails to particular groups of people.

A good practice is to Segment those who have engaged with you in the last 3 months. We do this by defining our segment to anyone who has opened or clicked an email in the last 90 days. By segmenting our engaged and unengaged subscribers, we can make sure we only send content to those who are more likely to read it, therefore improving our open and click through rate overall.

Klaviyo Benchmarks

The above benchmarks are designed to give you a guideline on how well your emails are performing compared to others across Klaviyo. However, it’s unlikely that every advertiser will fit into these benchmarks so it’s important to understand your business goals and objectives so you can select the benchmarks that are right for you.

If you have any queries or need any extra help, feel free to get in touch with Blend. We’ll be on hand to give any extra advice or help.