What's a Good Email Open Rate for eCommerce, and Can You Still Trust It?

There's no single good email open rate for an eCommerce store, and you can't fully trust the one in your dashboard. Apple Mail Privacy Protection loads email images before anyone reads them, so an open can be logged whether or not a person saw the email. Hayes Media, an email and SMS retention agency for DTC and Shopify brands, judges email on revenue per recipient and placed order rate instead. Open rate only gets compared against your own history and Klaviyo's peer benchmarks.

This piece explains why the number is inflated, where to find a fair comparison for your store, and which numbers we check first when we open an account.

What's a good email open rate for an eCommerce store?

A good open rate is one that holds steady or improves against your own past sends and sits in a healthy range for stores like yours. There isn't a universal figure, because open rate moves with your list, your industry, your send mix, and how many of your subscribers read email in Apple Mail with privacy protection turned on.

We don't quote an industry average here on purpose. Klaviyo's Benchmarks feature builds a comparison for your own account, and that's a better yardstick than one number for every store.

Where do I find a fair open rate benchmark for my store?

Inside Klaviyo, open Benchmarks. Klaviyo's help center says your peer group is "a set of 100 companies that are similar to your own in industry, size, and scope," so you're compared with brands like yours, not with every sender on the platform.

Each metric gets a status of poor, fair, good, or excellent against that peer group, and Klaviyo reports the 25th, 50th (median), and 75th percentiles. Klaviyo also notes that the rates in benchmarks "represent the averages over a specific time period," such as last month. So read the trend over several months, not one snapshot.

The Benchmarks report lists open rate next to click rate, placed order rate, and email revenue per recipient. Open rate is the one Apple's privacy feature inflates directly. Orders can pick up credit from automatic opens too, through a Klaviyo setting covered below.

Why is my open rate inflated now?

Apple's own support page says Mail Privacy Protection "prevents senders from seeing if you've opened the email message they sent you." On a Mac, Apple describes the Protect Mail Activity setting as a way to "privately download remote content in the background when a message is received (instead of when you view it)."

That's the whole mechanism. An email open is tracked when a tiny image, the tracking pixel, loads. Klaviyo's help center explains that when a recipient has this feature on, "all images in the messages they receive will be preemptively loaded, whether the recipient opens the email or not." The pixel loads, Klaviyo logs an open, and nobody may have read it.

Klaviyo states the result plainly: this "artificially inflates your open rates and makes it harder to identify subscribers who are truly engaged." Its email metrics reference says the same thing: "it's important to understand that open rates will be inflated."

Can I separate real opens from Apple opens?

Partly. Klaviyo tags every open event with a property called Apple Privacy Open, set to True or False. When it's True, Klaviyo says the open could have come from the inbox or from a person, "and there's no way to differentiate between the two." When it's False, the open came from a device without the feature on.

Klaviyo notes the flag exists for Opened Email events on or after November 20, 2021, so older opens may not carry it. You can filter on it in segments, which is useful for list hygiene. It doesn't fix the headline open rate on a campaign report.

What does Hayes Media measure instead of open rate?

Hayes Media reads email on two numbers first: revenue per recipient and placed order rate. Both end at a real order, but check one setting before you trust them. Klaviyo's conversion tracking guide says conversions are tracked "if Apple Mail Privacy Protection (MPP) automatically opens the email," and that you can adjust a setting to exclude those opens. Change that setting first, so automatic Apple opens stop counting toward your conversions.

Revenue per recipient. Klaviyo defines it as the revenue generated from a campaign or flow "divided by the number of deliveries." It shows what each email is worth to you, so you can compare a campaign to a campaign and a flow to a flow.

Placed order rate. Klaviyo's benchmark page lists placed order rate among its rates and defines conversion rate as the share of people "who place an order after interacting with your email out of the people who receive your email." It tells you whether the email moved people to buy.

Click rate. Klaviyo measures it as the share of people who click out of the people who received the email. Klaviyo tracks a click through the link itself, not an image, so Apple's automatic image load doesn't log one. That makes click rate a cleaner engagement signal than open rate, and it explains why placed order rate moved.

Open rate stays on the report as a diagnostic, never as the scoreboard. That's the same view in our guide to the Klaviyo flows every store needs: opens and clicks are instruments, and the flow set is judged on repeat purchase rate, time to second order, and the revenue it drives.

A worked example (made-up numbers)

These numbers are made up to show the mechanism. They aren't from a client or a benchmark.

Say you send two campaigns to the same list. Campaign A shows a 52% open rate and $0.18 revenue per recipient. Campaign B shows a 41% open rate and $0.31 revenue per recipient.

On opens, A looks like the winner. On money, B earned more for every email delivered. If a large share of A's opens came from Apple's automatic image loads, the 52% says little about how many people read it. The revenue per recipient gap is the part you can act on: find what B did differently in its offer, product, or audience, and test it again.

The same trap shows up in subject line tests. If a test picks its winner on opens, part of the signal is automatic loads. Pick winners on clicks or placed order rate where your platform lets you.

Which numbers does Hayes Media check first in an email audit?

The order follows the five-part email marketing audit we run on every account: deliverability, flow coverage, campaign balance, list health, and attribution honesty. Here are the numbers we read in each part.

Deliverability. Spam complaint rate, bounce rate, and unsubscribe rate over months, plus domain authentication. If mail lands in spam, nothing else in the report counts.

Flow coverage. Revenue per recipient for each flow, compared with Klaviyo's flow benchmarks for your revenue band and order value. A missing or weak welcome series shows up here fast, because it's the first email a new subscriber gets.

Campaign balance. Revenue per recipient and placed order rate for each campaign, and how revenue splits between flows and campaigns.

List health. The size of the unengaged segment, built with Apple opens filtered out so people who never really read your email don't count as engaged.

Attribution honesty. Email-attributed revenue checked against total store revenue, and what happens to sales when sends pause. Over time, we watch whether email moves repeat purchase rate cohort by cohort.

Open rate gets read inside deliverability as a trend. We don't grade the program on it.

How do Klaviyo's flow benchmarks help?

Klaviyo publishes a flow benchmarks reference with revenue per recipient ranges by annual revenue band, flow type, and average order value. For example, in its table for brands with up to $1M in annual revenue, an abandoned cart flow with an AOV between $44 and $83 shows $0.86 at the 25th percentile and $2.91 at the 75th.

Klaviyo is clear that these columns "show comparison values at the lower and upper ends of the range, not a guaranteed result for your flow." Use the row that matches your store, and treat it as a reference point, not a target.

When does open rate still matter?

Open rate still has two honest uses.

A sudden drop. If opens fall sharply across your whole list, including non-Apple opens, that can point to a deliverability problem. Check spam complaints and authentication before you blame the subject lines.

Opens from devices without privacy protection. The opens flagged False, covered above, are a cleaner sample. Use them, with clicks, when you decide who counts as engaged.

Outside those two cases, don't chase a higher open rate. If open rate rises while revenue per recipient stays flat, don't count it as a win: automatic Apple loads can raise opens with no change in buying.

How Hayes Media runs this for your store

Hayes Media builds and runs retention for eCommerce brands: email, SMS, loyalty programs, and subscribe-and-save. We work in Klaviyo for most accounts and have experience on most other email and SMS platforms. Email on its own is a full engagement with us, and you can read more on how our email and SMS service works or what an eCommerce email marketing agency should do for you.

Hayes Media works with brands doing at least $100K per month in revenue. It's a guideline, not a gate: a smaller brand with a clear budget set aside to scale and real order volume already qualifies.

One-time email projects start from $2,000 USD, and retainers for ongoing full management start from $4,000 USD per month, scoped on the discovery call.

Sources

Apple Support: Use Mail Privacy Protection on iPhone. Source for what Mail Privacy Protection hides from senders, including whether an email was opened.

Apple Support: Change Privacy settings in Mail on Mac. Source for Protect Mail Activity downloading remote content in the background when a message arrives.

Klaviyo Help Center: How to identify iOS15 Mail Privacy Protection opens. Source for preloaded images, inflated open rates, the Apple Privacy Open flag, and its November 20, 2021 start date.

Klaviyo Help Center: Email metrics reference. Source for Klaviyo's statement that open rates will be inflated.

Klaviyo Help Center: Getting started with benchmarks reports. Source for performance statuses, percentiles, averaged rates, and the definitions of open rate, click rate, and conversion rate.

Klaviyo Help Center: Understanding peer groups, benchmarks, and how Klaviyo uses your data. Source for how Klaviyo builds your peer group.

Klaviyo Help Center: How to calculate revenue per recipient. Source for the revenue per recipient definition.

Klaviyo Help Center: Benchmarks for flow emails reference. Source for the flow revenue per recipient ranges and the abandoned cart example.

Klaviyo Help Center: Understanding message conversion tracking. Source for conversions counting automatic Apple opens, the setting that excludes them, and click tracking through each link.

If you want to know what your open rate is hiding, we'll audit your account and show you your revenue per recipient and placed order rate by flow and campaign against your peers, plus what to fix first. No onboarding fees. No lock-in contracts. No junior marketers. Book a discovery call