Email Segmentation Benchmarks - Klaviyo
2026-03-10 23:17 Diff
https://www.klaviyo.com/marketing-resources/segmentation-benchmark-report

We analyzed over 2.5 billion emails – 2,619,441,297 to be exact – sent by US-based Klaviyo customers between October 1 and December 31, 2017. These segmented and unsegmented email campaigns were reviewed to determine performance against four metrics:

• Unique open rates – the average number of recipients who opened the email. In other words, the communication captured their interest;

• Unique click-through rates (CTR) – average number of recipients who clicked on a link in the email. These recipients were engaged enough to take an action;

• Revenue per recipient (RPR) – the average amount of money spent by email recipient. This conversion metric is the important business value indicator;

• Unsubscribe rate – the average number of clicks on the unsubscribe link in the email. These non-retained subscribers represent a loss of potential revenue.

The key business measure here is revenue per recipient (RPR). Focusing only on total email revenue often leads to poor email marketing practices like batch and blast. These practices may result in short-term revenue gains, but low open rates and the damage to sender reputation/deliverability, in addition to high unsubscribe rates, have long-term negative consequences.

We assume that when lists are highly segmented to a small portion of the overall base, those campaigns are being sent to engaged subscribers. In some instances, we have pulled unengaged subscriber data into our results. For example, win-back and re-engagement campaigns are a best practice for keeping healthy lists, but the performance of these segments will be much lower than campaigns sent to engaged segments. Some of these segments have been included in the overall results.