2023 Klaviyo Benchmark Report & Strategies

First, we wanted to share the overall performance of email and SMS marketing as reported by Klaviyo. You may be curious to know how your industry’s benchmarks compare to the metrics as a whole.

Overall Email & SMS Metrics

👗 Download Apparel & Accessories PDF

When it comes to the apparel and accessories industry, successful email and SMS marketing relies on building strong relationships with customers, growing loyalty, and personalizing the customer experience. Here’s what the metrics say about how successful those efforts were across the industry.

Apparel & Accessories Metrics

Tips to Improve Your Metrics

To capitalize on email and SMS marketing, you must first consider and understand all the touchpoints in the end-to-end customer journey. If you’re ready to improve your strategy, try implementing our recommendations.

Entice with pop-ups.

Incentivize a visitor to become a subscriber with a pop-up, then convince them to become a customer through flows and campaigns. It’s far more effective to focus on each individual step and guide them along the way. Plus, this is a great time to collect first-party data.

Take a look at how BAD Workwear makes the visitor want to sign up for emails with a gift:

Don’t skimp on storytelling. 

For apparel and accessories brands, storytelling is a valuable tactic to try in your welcome flow. After all, it’s your first opportunity to connect with subscribers. With this, you can inspire, develop interest, and stand out from your competitors.

Scale personalization. 

Some brands avoid one-to-one personalization because it may seem difficult to implement with a wide audience base. However, an all-in-one tool such as Klaviyo makes personalization easy with dynamic blocks. This can turn one-to-many into what looks like one-to-one personalization to the customer, so you can easily scale personalization.

Take advantage of behavioral segmentation. 

When sending emails through Klaviyo, you can easily segment emails based on shopping behavior, demographics, and any other data deemed relevant for your brand. This allows you to meet your audience intelligently and appropriately at every stage of their journey.

Engage your audience through education. 

Audiences are more likely to want to make informed purchase decisions when it comes to apparel and accessories. BAD Workwear takes this approach by providing customers with information on their product materials and innovations:

🚗 Download Automotive PDF

Has your brand built a strong community through email and SMS marketing? Are you getting to know your audience and nurturing those relationships? Learn strategies for doing just that—and more—after reviewing the automotive industry’s benchmarks.

Automotive Metrics

Tips to Improve Your Metrics

Successful email and SMS marketing takes nurturing your audience from your first welcome email to beyond the purchase. You must understand who your audience is and build a community based on loyalty and trust. 

Use pop-ups to collect first-party data. 

When someone ends up on your website, you want to first encourage them to become a subscriber; then, you can work toward convincing them to buy. A great way to start this relationship is by using a sign-up form. Not only does this give you consent to send marketing communications, but you can also gain valuable knowledge about who your audience is.

Take a look at Shine Armor’s eye-catching pop-up message:

Optimize behavioral segmentation. 

Once you’ve gathered knowledge about your audience, send them emails they’ll actually want to receive through segmentation. Tools such as Klaviyo make it easy to sort and send your emails to the correct recipients.

Build a community.

When you gain a subscriber, chances are they have a passion for their ride‚ whether it’s a car, motorcycle, or RV. It’s an opportunity to connect and build a community of similarly minded enthusiasts. To do this, personalize your emails with dynamic blocks to make one-to-many emails appear as one-to-one to the recipient. Share exclusive promotions and educational content to a VIP list. Build loyalty and trust with reviews from customers.

Learn more with A/B testing.  

You’ll gain valuable knowledge about your audience this way. See what type of emails each segment responds to best, whether it’s exclusive deals or nurture emails. With data from Klaviyo, you can adjust your strategy accordingly. 

Keep your audience engaged with education. 

Help subscribers make informed purchase decisions on their vehicles, accessories, and other related products. Take your emails as opportunities to educate; you’ll become a trusted source, and they’ll be more likely to buy.

💻 Download Electronics PDF

Audiences receiving email and SMS marketing communications for electronics can range far and wide. Are they familiar with the intricacies of the latest technologies, or are they casual users? How do you know what messaging to include in your campaigns? We’ll get into segmenting your audiences later, but first, let’s take a look at the industry’s benchmarks.

Electronics Metrics

Tips to Improve Your Metrics

So, where does your brand fall within these benchmarks? If you’re noticing room for improvement, take a moment to evaluate your strategy and consider how you can integrate the following tips into your marketing efforts.

Collect first-party data.

To send the right emails to the right people within your audience, you must first understand who your audience is and what they’re looking for. Easily collect this information right off the bat with a simple method: using a sign-up form.

When a visitor lands on your website, it’s your first chance to form a connection. That’s where your pop-up messaging comes in. Entice them to subscribe with a sign-up form so that:

• They can enjoy the benefits of subscribing and get a targeted, personalized experience.

• You can collect the data you need to properly segment your emails and understand your audience.

Segmentation is key. 

When you segment emails to the proper audiences, you’ll increase the likelihood of receiving their business—and their trust. With Klaviyo, you can easily group together members of your audience and ensure they receive the right messaging. 

Be technical but approachable. 

When it comes to the electronics industry, you want to show that you know what you’re talking about—but not in a way that will go over your audience’s heads. One way to do this is through educational emails. Perhaps you can focus on all the unique features of a certain product and highlight its functionality. Use technical terminology, but explain it in a way that makes sense to newcomers and experts alike.
Not only will your audience understand what they need to know, but you’ll become a trusted source of knowledge within the industry.

Practice A/B testing. 

It’s a great way to learn about your audience and adapt accordingly. Try out different subject lines, offer different incentives, and see what your recipients respond to best. With Klaviyo, you can easily access this data and learn how to best target your messaging.

Send abandoned cart and post-purchase emails. 

Perhaps some members of your audience know exactly what they’re looking for. Others may be comparing and contrasting all their options and adding potential winners to their cart along the way. Don’t let them forget about the products they considered buying. By sending out abandoned cart emails, you’ll not just remind them of the items they left behind, but you’ll also continue the conversation and nurture the relationship with your audience.

And once they become a customer, send post-purchase emails to show your gratitude for their business, update them on their order, and—when the time is right—encourage them to make future purchases.

☕ Download Food & Beverage PDF

The surge in demand for doorstep food and beverage delivery is here to stay, so it’s more important than ever to adapt. See how the industry performed in email and SMS marketing over the past year.

Food & Beverage Metrics

Tips to Improve Your Metrics

According to McKinsey & Company, 60-70 percent of consumers shop in an omnichannel way, putting the importance of brand consistency and cohesiveness at the forefront. How can your brand achieve this?

Build your audience using forms, and do so creatively. 

Incorporating a fun quiz or questionnaire into your pop-up form not only helps you easily collect first-party data but also encourages visitor engagement, like so:

Personalize, personalize, personalize. 

Once a visitor subscribes, you want to form as much of a connection as possible. Segmentation and dynamic blocks will help messaging feel as one-to-one as possible—even when you’re sending an email to thousands of people. 

Practice proper segmentation. 

Klaviyo makes it easy to segment recipients by any criteria, such as demographic information, purchase history, or source of opt-in. You also want to consider messaging for first-time customers versus returning customers.

As noted by Kira Renee, E-Commerce Product Marketing Manager at SmartBug Media, “When establishing that relationship with a first-time customer, how and when you communicate is extremely important. If they just placed their first order, don't bombard them with upsell or subscription emails when they haven't even received your product yet. Be strategic in what you say and when you say it.”

After someone makes their first purchase, you could send a personalized thank-you message, or you could share your company values like California Olive Ranch does:

Make replenishment and reordering easy. 

Appropriately time your automatic replenishment flows, and ensure reordering is as simple as a click away within your email or text. In Klaviyo, you can use the repeat integration to power dynamic reorder buttons, banners, and links, taking them right back to their carts.

🔨 Download Hardware & Home Improvement PDF

For the hardware and home improvement industry, email and SMS have proven to be valuable tools. Your audience is buying products to tackle repairs, improvements, and projects on their own, so a channel for communication and education is key.

Let’s see how the industry performed over the past year.

Hardware & Home Improvement Metrics

Tips to Improve Your Metrics

You want to be more than a brand to your audience; you want to be a trusted source of knowledge when it comes to taking on projects. Email and SMS marketing is your opportunity to assume that role.

Understand your audience. 

To do this, you’ll want to collect first-party data. What are your audience members’ goals? Are they contractors or DIY enthusiasts? Figure out what type of messaging would benefit them the most.

You can collect this kind of information by utilizing sign-up forms when prompting website visitors to opt in to emails. Not only will you get the information you need, but your visitors also may feel inclined to opt in to a more personalized experience.

Segment your messaging. 

Once you’ve established which members of your audience belong in each group, you can send targeted emails to those recipients. Klaviyo makes this easy by storing contacts within each group for proper segmentation. See how Leggari provides relevant information to contractors?

Encourage opting in to SMS. 

For the hardware and home improvement industry, SMS can be a particularly powerful method of communication. Picture this: A subscriber is relaxing at home on a Saturday afternoon, and they receive a text about a tool to make that DIY project they’ve been thinking about become a reality. With an easy-to-click link in the message, you may have inspired the recipient to take on a fun weekend project and buy your product. 

Educate your audience. 

Those in your audience tackling DIY projects may feel intimidated by a lack of experience. Show how easy it is to use your product to take on any project. If your brand has a YouTube channel, you’ll want to feature your videos in your emails—bonus points if they walk through the steps of using your product step by step.

Not only will your audience become engaged by learning how-tos, but you’ll also become a trusted source of knowledge. 

Continue the conversation through abandoned cart emails and post-purchase emails. 

From your welcome email on, your goal should be to build a relationship with your audience. To really establish loyalty, you need to be there through every step of the journey.

If they’ve left items in their cart, remind them of the products they left behind. Incentivize the purchase by offering a discount or providing customer reviews. Once they do decide to purchase and officially become a customer, show that you still care by thanking them, providing updates on their order, and continuing to nurture the relationship.

🧖 Download Health & Beauty PDF

Consumers aren’t giving up their self-care routines. In fact, according to a survey, 7 out of 10 shoppers admitted to spending more on beauty products in 2022. However, they are still on the hunt for sales. That same survey found that 44 percent of consumers tried new products simply because there were promotions or discounts.

The bottom line? The health and beauty industry remains resilient. Let’s look at the numbers.

Health & Beauty Metrics

Tips to Improve Your Metrics

How can you succeed in the competitive health and beauty space? To keep it short and simple: Stay top of mind, engage consumers, and create an enjoyable customer experience. But if you’re looking for more in-depth tips and tricks:

Collect detailed first-party data. 

When it comes to health and beauty brands, products range far and wide for varying preferences and needs. Help your shoppers figure out what they want (and get the information you need to segment your messaging in the process).

A great way to do this is by sharing a quiz prompt in your sign-up form, so you can collect information on their birthday, skin or hair type, beauty routine, issues with current products, and more.

Plus, you can entice visitors to subscribe to both email and SMS marketing by providing an even better discount in a two-step process.

Spark consumers’ interest. 

Make your brand feel more desirable by offering exclusive deals and early access. Not only will this encourage them to purchase quicker, but they also may feel a stronger personal connection to your brand.

Share user-generated content.

Build trust by showing prospective buyers how much other customers love their products. User-generated content gives an authentic, relatable look at your products and may encourage them to purchase and share their own posts featuring the product.

Build a community and grow lifetime value. 

It’s not always easy to stand out from the crowd in the health and beauty space. However, building communities and segmenting special emails to those members grows value and instills deeper trust.

🪴 Download Home & Garden PDF

The home and garden industry can be tricky when reeling in online consumers. While you may have an audience perusing your products on your website and subscribing to your emails, online engagement serves as more of a complement to physical retail. To put it plainly: Customers may engage online, but they’ll likely buy in an offline channel.

See how the industry benchmarks below reflect this consumer behavior. Then, we’ll share email and SMS marketing strategies to take your brand to the top.

Home & Garden Metrics

Tips to Improve Your Metrics

Even if email and SMS marketing aren’t the sole way for home and garden brands to bring in revenue, that doesn’t make them any less important. Here’s how your brand can best utilize these tools:

Build your audience. 

First, increase traffic to your website through advertising, referrals, search, and good press. Then, invite your website visitors to opt in to emails and SMS campaigns with a sign-up form—but not in a way that feels overly persuasive.

Project Solar captures interest by offering to design your home for free. Who wouldn’t want to learn more?

Once they’re in the door, that’s your time to build a stronger connection, communicate important information, and encourage future purchases.

Collect first-party data. 

When prompting visitors to sign up to become subscribers, set up your form in the style of a quiz or questionnaire. That way, you can ask important questions about things such as their age, living space, lifestyle, and home preferences so you can segment appropriately.

Encourage referrals. 

Take your welcome series to the next level by encouraging referrals within your emails. Execute an audience-first approach by allowing referrers to send personal notes to their friends. Not only does this provide more personal incentives, but it also enhances trust.

Educate subscribers about the value of your brand. 

Inexpensive build-your-own furniture certainly had its moment (especially during the pandemic). But now, consumers are once again inclined to purchase long-lasting, high-quality, sustainable pieces. Make that a priority in your marketing approach by sharing the value and quality of your products.

Retain customers and grow lifetime value. 

When customers buy more than once, they’re more likely to leave reviews, send referrals, and post user-generated content. Focus your messaging for repeat customers on upselling complementary products and sharing restock alerts to increase conversions. Additionally, enhance engagement with win-back flows and sunset flows.

🥕 Download Mass Merchant PDF

When it comes to the mass merchant industry, finding a way to personalize connections with your audience may seem tricky. That’s where email marketing comes in. First, let’s take a look at how the industry performed over the past year with email marketing strategies.

Mass Merchant Metrics

Tips to Improve Your Metrics

Luckily, with a tool such as Klaviyo, you can make any communication with your audience feel personalized and ultimately increase revenue. Here’s how it works:

Use first-party data to your advantage. 

Collecting data from website visitors is the perfect first step to help your audience feel connected to your brand and get the information you need. Get their foot in the door by enticing them with a pop-up featuring an incentive. When they’re signing up using a form, you can include simple questions about their demographics, shopping needs, and more.

Frame the messaging so that it focuses on the benefits they’ll get from sharing this information with you, such as tailored emails, targeted promotions, and more. From this, you’ll receive essential data to properly segment emails and make the experience spark engagement.

Personalization is possible. 

Despite having a large audience, you can take steps to personalize your messaging. With dynamic blocks, Klaviyo takes the work out of it for you, so you can send one-to-many emails to thousands of subscribers, and they’ll appear as one-to-one on the recipient’s end.

It may seem small, but it’s a wonderful way to form a connection and make your audience feel like part of your brand’s community.

Feature dynamic product recommendations. 

As a mass merchandising brand, your site may feature quite a variety of products. Use audience behavior to your benefit, and feature products in your emails related to the items subscribers were browsing on your site.

Klaviyo makes it easy to set up dynamic product recommendations, so your audience will automatically get a more tailored and personal experience—and they’ll be more likely to buy.

Send abandoned cart emails. 

Once a visitor to your site has added items to their cart, they have officially shown interest in making a purchase. Nearly 70 percent of carts are left abandoned, according to the Baymard Institute, which means you have lots of room for opportunity. Remind them of the items they left behind, and if needed, offer a discount and a personal helping hand.

🖇️ Download Office Supplies PDF

The office supplies industry naturally has a wide audience when it comes to marketing its products. The industry has plenty of sales opportunities, including selling to those returning to the office post-pandemic, those adapting to a work-from-home lifestyle, or anyone wanting to update their workspace.

Interested in how the industry used email marketing to drive those sales? See the benchmarks below.

Office Supplies Metrics

Tips to Improve Your Metrics

When strategizing your email marketing efforts, it’s important to prioritize staying top of mind to your audience. You want to be the go-to brand whenever they need new office supplies. How do you do this?

Get to know your audience. 

You want to know who your audience is and what they’re shopping for. That way, you can deliver a more personalized experience and send the right message to the right audience members.

Grab their attention and get this information right from the get-go with a sign-up form. When welcoming them to opt in to emails, take the opportunity to collect first-party data, such as:

• Do they work from home or in an office?
• What’s their age range?
• What industry do they work in?

This will help you to properly target products, build trust, and enhance the likelihood of a purchase.

Try creative marketing methods. 

If you want to stand out from the rest of the crowd, try creating an engaging brand voice and sticking to it. You’ll become more than just an office supplies brand—you’ll become a brand your audience wants to keep up with.

See if this method works for you by conducting A/B tests. Klaviyo makes it easy to run these tests and gather the data to properly gauge how your audience responds to certain messaging so you can adapt accordingly.

Take a personalized approach.

Build a connection with your audience by personalizing as much as possible. Not only can you make the experience feel this way by practicing proper segmentation of your emails, but you can also utilize dynamic blocks. In Klaviyo, easily turn one-to-many messaging into what looks like one-to-one messaging to the recipient.

Send friendly reminders. 

Patience is key when waiting for someone to make their first purchase. However, you should still be there every step of the way to kindly encourage them to buy. Once they’ve added items to their cart, they’ve shown interest in your brand. This is a wonderful opportunity to keep the conversation going and remind them of the items they picked.

Offer to be a helping hand or even share a promotion to give them the extra nudge. The Baymard Institute reported that nearly 70 percent of shopping carts are left abandoned, so don’t waste the opportunity to encourage the purchase.

Build loyalty with post-purchase emails. 

Nurture your audience and ensure they keep coming back for more. You want to keep the relationship after the first purchase, so be sure to show gratitude, share updates on their order, and ask about their order after they’ve received it. Then, take the opportunity to upsell related items.

⚽ Download Sporting Goods PDF

The pandemic brought forward a number of changes in behavior—some potentially permanent. One of those changes? Picking up new hobbies. Whether stuck in search of something to do or trying to get fresh air with friends, 20 percent of American adults were new to outdoor recreation during the pandemic. That, of course, means an uptick in sales for the sporting goods industry.

Sporting Goods Metrics

Tips to Improve Your Metrics

For sporting goods brands, it’s become more important than ever to take the widely ranging audience into consideration. Be sure to communicate effectively and in a welcoming manner, whether the subscriber is an outdoor sports newcomer or an experienced athlete. 

Entice visitors with pop-ups. 

Take the first opportunity you can to welcome visitors to your site with a sign-up form. For more targeted messaging, this is a great time to gather first-party data on their interest level and areas. Blix takes the “community” approach, which is effective in making site visitors feel welcome.

Make your sport feel accessible. 

From your welcome series on, show how your product makes your sport more accessible to both newcomers and skilled athletes. Don’t overcomplicate terminology, and show how everyone can easily access their happy place with your product.

Build trust. 

In the sporting goods industry, it’s expected that equipment and accessories of quality will come at a higher price point. This is why it’s so important to nurture relationships every step of the way. Your audience needs to trust and feel connected with your brand, so you want to take time to educate them about your products and patiently anticipate their business.

Don’t doubt the abandoned cart email. 

It’s a highly effective strategy for the sporting goods industry because your audience is likely comparing different brands and products before making their decision. Not only does the abandoned cart email remind the recipient of the items in their cart, but it’s also an opportunity to use the social proof tactic by showing best sellers as other potential options.

Follow up with post-purchase information. 

This may give the customer peace of mind with spending money on your product and will continue to build your relationship with them.

By thanking them for their business and sharing relevant information about their order, you’ll help them feel secure in their purchase and lay the groundwork for future purchases to come.

🎨 Download Toys & Hobbies PDF

Email and SMS marketing is key for the toys and hobbies industry. With so many products constantly being put on the market, it’s a way to make your brand stand out from the rest. Curious to see how the industry performed as a whole? 

Toys & Hobbies Metrics

Tips to Improve Your Metrics

To make improvements to your metrics, you’ll need to evaluate your strategy and make updates as necessary. The world of email and SMS marketing is an evolving one, so it’s important that you follow up-to-date best practices.

Collect first-party data using forms. 

First and foremost, you want to get to know your audience. What is the age range of the child they’re buying for? What are their interests? When a visitor lands on your website due to word of mouth or the power of search, you want to use sign-up forms to your advantage.

Not only will this help the visitor feel they’re getting a personal experience right away, but it will also help you properly segment your emails to the right audiences.

Make personalization easy by implementing dynamic blocks within your emails.

By using Klaviyo to send your emails, you can turn one-to-many emails into one-to-one personalization on the customer’s end—even when sending an email to thousands of recipients at once.

Build trust and nurture your audience.  

To encourage someone to become a customer, you’ll need to build a relationship founded on trust. This can take time because it may require a few rounds of messaging—and a purchase or two—before they feel loyal to your brand.

Some great ways to build trust include sharing user-generated content, customer reviews, and best-seller lists. 

Try A/B testing and use the results to continue improving your strategy. 

Once you’ve segmented emails to different groups, test out different variations of emails within those groups. Do discounts appeal better to that audience, or would they prefer a gift? Do they respond more to customer reviews or educational emails?

Klaviyo keeps track of these numbers easily, so you can continue to gain knowledge of your audience, cater your emails to their preferences, and ultimately drive more sales.

Keep your audience engaged no matter which stage they’re at. 

For those who added items to their cart without making a purchase, be sure to send abandoned cart emails to remind them of the products they showed interest in. Give them a nudge by offering help or a special discount.

Once they have made a purchase (yay!), keep that relationship strong by thanking them, updating them on their order, and making the overall experience exceptional to encourage future purchases.

No matter your industry, email and SMS are powerful tools in the marketing world. By sending your messaging through Klaviyo, you can evaluate just how successful your efforts really are. Use the data to learn and purposefully adapt your strategies.

Overall, your goals should be to:

• Collect data on your audience.
• Segment appropriately.
• Personalize your messaging.
• Become a trusted source of knowledge.
• Connect and build loyalty.
• Nurture your audience every step of the way.

Take the initiative to grow your business, increase revenue, and ensure your brand stands out from the rest.