These are guide ranges, not rules. Your category, stage, market and timing will move them, so use them to work out where to look, not to mark yourself pass or fail.
| Metric | Benchmark | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Email open rate | 25-40%, directional only | Open rates have been unreliable since Apple Mail Privacy Protection inflates them - the playbook treats click rate as the reliable signal. Below 20% usually points to list hygiene or deliverability problems, not bad subject lines. |
| Click-through rate | 2-3% average, 4-5% good, 6%+ excellent | Measured against delivered. Flows beat campaigns on CTR because intent is higher. |
| Email conversion rate | 3-5% per click | Post-click conversion to purchase. Strong abandoned-cart and post-purchase flows sit at the top of this range. |
| Unsubscribe rate | Ecommerce averages roughly 0.2-0.4% per campaign; persistently above about 0.5% is a common warning line | Quad Lock was comfortable under about 1% because it sent rarely and every email had a reason. Watch the trend: a rate that climbs as you add sends means frequency or relevance has slipped. An unsubscribe beats a spam complaint, so make leaving easy. |
| Popup signup conversion | 3-5% typical, 5-7% good, 8%+ excellent | The percentage of visitors who join your list via an on-site popup. Your single biggest lever on list growth. |
| Flows share of email revenue | 50-70% | The industry average is about 41%, with campaigns making up the rest. A flow earns around 18x a one-off campaign, so build welcome, abandoned cart and popup win-back before you add campaigns. |
| Welcome flow revenue | 5-10% of email revenue | Your highest-intent moment. Underbuilding the welcome flow leaves easy money on the table. |
| Abandoned cart flow revenue | 10-20% of email revenue | Typically the highest-earning single flow. Recovering carts is cheaper than acquiring replacements. |
| Post-purchase flow revenue | 5-12% of email revenue | Drives the second order and feeds retention. Where cross-sell and review requests live. |
| Win-back flow revenue | 3-8% of email revenue | Re-engages lapsing customers before you have to pay to reacquire them. |
| SMS click-through rate | 15-30% | SMS opens run 95%+, so click-through is the number worth watching. It is the most intimate channel and the easiest to abuse. |
| SMS send cadence | 2-6 a month | Not for regular content or several times a week. Send only between 8am and 9pm in the recipient's local time, and stay strict on consent. |
How to use these benchmarks
These ranges are guides, not guarantees or rules. They are drawn from The DTC Playbook and Rob Ward's experience taking Quad Lock from $0 to a $500M exit, cross-checked against widely cited DTC data. The point is not the exact number - it is whether you sit well above or below it, and what to do about the gap. Your category, stage, market and timing all move them, so judge yourself against your own trend as well.
Last reviewed: October 2026. Benchmarks are refreshed as the playbook is updated.
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