💬 Quick answer: Across 20 direct-to-consumer brands and ~90 million delivered campaign emails, the median email campaign click rate is 1.0% (top quartile ~1.4%+), with open rate at 49.8% (inflated by Apple Mail Privacy Protection), unsubscribe 0.40% and bounce 0.43%.
- Median email campaign click rate: 1.0% (IQR 0.49%–1.39%) — the primary, Apple-MPP-robust metric.
- Click-to-open 1.98%; unsubscribe 0.40%; bounce 0.43%; spam complaints 0.02%.
- Open rate is 49.8% but inflated by Apple Mail Privacy Protection, so treat it as directional.
- Based on 20 direct-to-consumer brands and ~90 million delivered campaign emails, July 2025–June 2026.
What is a good DTC email click rate in 2026?
The median email campaign click rate across 20 direct-to-consumer brands is 1.0%. The middle 50% of stores fall between 0.49% and 1.39%, so a click rate above roughly 1.4% is top-quartile performance.
What is a good email open rate for ecommerce?
The median campaign open rate is 49.8%, but Apple Mail Privacy Protection inflates opens by auto-loading images. Treat open rate as directional and judge performance primarily on click rate.
What is a healthy unsubscribe rate for email campaigns?
0.40% is the median. Rates persistently above about 0.5% signal list fatigue or targeting problems that will eventually hurt deliverability.
This benchmark reports real, first-party email campaign performance across 20 direct-to-consumer ecommerce brands over the twelve months ending June 2026 — roughly 90 million delivered emails. Every figure is the median across stores (each brand weighted equally) with its interquartile range (IQR), and we publish the full store-by-store distribution so you can see the spread rather than a single blended number.
Key benchmarks at a glance
Median and IQR for each core email campaign metric. Median is used instead of a simple average so a few very large senders can't distort the benchmark.
| Metric | Median | IQR (25th–75th) | Range |
|---|---|---|---|
| Click rate (primary) | 1.0% | 0.49% – 1.39% | 0.32% – 3.02% |
| Click-to-open rate | 1.98% | 1.11% – 3.51% | 0.58% – 6.42% |
| Open rate* | 49.8% | 42.9% – 56.2% | 10.6% – 69.1% |
| Unsubscribe rate | 0.40% | 0.27% – 0.72% | 0.04% – 1.47% |
| Bounce rate | 0.43% | 0.34% – 0.61% | 0.17% – 3.12% |
| Spam complaint rate | 0.02% | 0.01% – 0.02% | 0.00% – 0.06% |
What is a good email click rate?
Click rate — unique clicks ÷ delivered — is the metric we lead with, because it is not distorted by Apple Mail Privacy Protection the way open rate is. The median DTC campaign click rate is 1.0%. The middle 50% of brands land between 0.49% and 1.39%, and the strongest sender reached 3.02%. Below ~0.5% is bottom-quartile and usually points to weak segmentation or list fatigue; above ~1.4% is top-quartile. You can check your own with our email CTR calculator.
The store-by-store distribution shows why a single average is misleading — real DTC click rates span a 9× range depending on list quality, send cadence and offer strength.
Email engagement trend, month by month
Engagement is seasonal. Pooled across all 20 brands, campaign click rate dipped to 0.41% in September 2025 — the post-summer lull — then climbed steadily through the first half of 2026 to a high of 1.62% in June. Click-to-open followed the same shape, so the swing reflects genuine engagement, not just list or deliverability changes. Note the pooled (volume-weighted) click rate of ~0.8% runs below the equal-weight store median of 1.0% because a handful of very large senders dominate total volume.
| Month | Click rate | Click-to-open | Open rate* |
|---|---|---|---|
| Jul '25 | 0.89% | 2.07% | 43.0% |
| Aug '25 | 0.72% | 1.55% | 46.8% |
| Sep '25 | 0.41% | 0.88% | 46.5% |
| Oct '25 | 0.47% | 1.08% | 43.2% |
| Nov '25 | 0.80% | 1.96% | 41.0% |
| Dec '25 | 1.14% | 2.82% | 40.5% |
| Jan '26 | 0.61% | 1.31% | 46.7% |
| Feb '26 | 0.63% | 1.50% | 42.4% |
| Mar '26 | 0.63% | 1.87% | 33.9% |
| Apr '26 | 1.12% | 2.86% | 39.1% |
| May '26 | 1.31% | 3.11% | 42.1% |
| Jun '26 | 1.62% | 2.92% | 55.4% |
| TTM pooled | 0.82% | 1.94% | 42.6% |
Benchmarks by sender size and category
List size is the single biggest driver of engagement in the panel. Larger senders mail broader, less-engaged lists, so their rates are structurally lower — a $50M brand and a $2M brand should not hold themselves to the same click rate. The six largest senders (≥2M emails/year) clicked at a median of just 0.38%, roughly a third of the mid-tier rate. Benchmark against your own tier, not the blended median.
| Sender tier (annual volume) | Stores | Click | Open* | CTOR | Unsub |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Large sender (≥2M delivered) | 6 | 0.38% | 50.5% | 1.05% | 0.24% |
| Mid sender (250K–2M) | 11 | 1.29% | 54.0% | 1.96% | 0.50% |
| Small sender (<250K) | 3 | 1.17% | 40.9% | 4.18% | 0.28% |
Category matters too. Grouping the panel into broad DTC categories, beauty & personal care brands posted the highest median click rate (1.49%) and food & beverage the lowest (0.52%) — a roughly 3× spread driven by how considered the purchase is and how promotional the category runs. Categories are kept deliberately wide so no individual brand is identifiable, and per-category samples are small, so read these as directional.
| Category | Brands | Click | Open* | CTOR | Unsub |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Beauty & Personal Care | 3 | 1.49% | 43.6% | 3.41% | 0.43% |
| Apparel, Jewelry & Lifestyle | 4 | 1.32% | 47.1% | 2.35% | 0.36% |
| Home, Garden & Hardware | 5 | 1.00% | 50.9% | 3.20% | 0.28% |
| Specialty & Other | 5 | 0.81% | 52.4% | 1.99% | 0.78% |
| Food & Beverage | 3 | 0.52% | 54.0% | 0.96% | 0.30% |
Open rate and Apple Mail Privacy Protection
The median open rate is 49.8%, but this figure is materially inflated by Apple Mail Privacy Protection (MPP), which pre-loads images and registers an open whether or not the recipient engaged. Because a large, variable share of any modern list is on Apple Mail, open rate is now a poor comparison metric — use it to spot large directional swings, but judge campaign quality on click rate and click-to-open. (Our open-rate calculator helps you track it.)
List health: unsubscribe, bounce and spam
The median unsubscribe rate is 0.40% and the median bounce rate is 0.43%; spam complaints sit at a median of 0.02%. These deliverability guardrails matter as much as engagement: unsubscribe rates persistently above ~0.5%, bounce rates above ~1%, or spam complaints above ~0.05% (roughly the Gmail/Yahoo tolerance) will erode inbox placement over time.
How your numbers compare to published benchmarks
Platform-wide benchmarks such as Klaviyo's — drawn from over 183,000 accounts — report blended averages across all industries and account sizes. Useful for orientation, but they mix B2B, lead-gen and enterprise senders in with DTC ecommerce and report a single average rather than a distribution. This benchmark is narrower and more comparable for a DTC brand: a defined panel, campaign sends only, and the full spread shown. If your click rate is near 1.0% you are at the DTC median; the goal is the 1.4%+ top quartile.
How to benchmark your own program
- Pull the last 12 months of campaign sends only (exclude flows) from your ESP.
- Compute click rate as unique clicks ÷ delivered, and click-to-open as unique clicks ÷ unique opens.
- Compare your click rate to the 1.0% median and the 1.39% top-quartile threshold.
- Check unsubscribe (<0.5%), bounce (<1%) and spam (<0.05%) as deliverability guardrails.
- Model the revenue upside with our email marketing ROI calculator.
Methodology and sample
- Sample: 20 direct-to-consumer ecommerce brands on Klaviyo. ~90,296,070 delivered campaign emails.
- Window: trailing twelve months, July 2025 – June 2026.
- Definitions: open rate = unique opens ÷ delivered; click rate = unique clicks ÷ delivered; click-to-open = unique clicks ÷ unique opens; unsubscribe = unsubscribes ÷ delivered; bounce = bounced ÷ recipients; spam = complaints ÷ delivered.
- Aggregation: per-store rate first, then median and IQR across stores (equal weight).
- Scope & limits: campaign sends only; open rate carries an Apple MPP caveat; convenience panel of agency-managed DTC brands, not a random sample; store identities removed, only pooled statistics published.
Click rate percentiles and list size
The full percentile spread of campaign click rate across the panel — use it to place your own program precisely, not just above/below one median:
| Percentile | Campaign click rate |
|---|---|
| Top 10% | 2.46% |
| Top 25% | 1.39% |
| Median | 1.00% |
| Bottom 25% | 0.49% |
| Bottom 10% | 0.34% |
Read this alongside the benchmarks by sender size above: where you land in these percentiles depends heavily on your list size, so weigh both together rather than judging against the single median.
Sources and methodology
Every figure on this page is computed from first-party Klaviyo data across the panel described above; external comparison figures are cited to their original publisher.
- Klaviyo — 2026 email marketing benchmarks
- Baymard Institute — cart & checkout abandonment
- Top Growth Marketing — DTC Checkout Abandonment Benchmark 2026
See also our DTC Checkout Abandonment Benchmark 2026. Suggested citation: Top Growth Marketing (2026). DTC Email Performance Benchmark 2026. Last updated August 2026.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is a good email click rate for DTC ecommerce?
Across 20 direct-to-consumer brands, the median email campaign click rate was 1.0%, with the middle 50% of stores between 0.49% and 1.39%. A campaign click rate at or above ~1.4% puts a DTC sender in the top quartile.
What is a good email open rate for ecommerce in 2026?
The median campaign open rate was 49.8%, but open rate is inflated by Apple Mail Privacy Protection, which auto-opens messages. Treat it as directional and judge performance on click rate.
What is a healthy unsubscribe and bounce rate?
The median unsubscribe rate was 0.40% and the median bounce rate 0.43%. Unsubscribe rates consistently above ~0.5% or bounce rates above ~1% are early warning signs for list health and deliverability.
How is this different from Klaviyo or Mailchimp benchmarks?
Most published benchmarks aggregate platform-wide averages across hundreds of thousands of accounts. This benchmark reports the median across a defined panel of 20 DTC brands and shows the full store-by-store distribution, not just a single blended average.
What counts as a campaign vs a flow?
This benchmark covers one-time campaign (broadcast) sends only. Automated flows such as welcome, abandoned-cart and post-purchase typically show higher engagement and are excluded here; a flow benchmark is planned.