FASHION EMAIL
THAT HOLDS
43.3% open rate. 2.86% click rate. Both above industry average — simultaneously. 62 flows, 50 campaigns, and an unsubscribe rate under 0.35%.
THE FASHION
EMAIL PROBLEM
Fashion and activewear email has a well-documented problem. Subscribers sign up during a discount moment — a first-purchase offer, a seasonal sale, a welcome popup — collect the code, and disengage. The brand used a discount to acquire the email address. The subscriber associated the email address with discounts. When the discounts stop, so does the engagement.
Most fashion email programs try to solve this by sending more frequently and leaning harder on promotions. That compounds the problem. Open rates drop as subscribers learn that most emails don't warrant attention. Unsubscribe rates climb when sends feel like noise rather than signal. The spiral accelerates.
The industry average for fashion email open rate is around 20-25%. Click rates average 2-2.5%. Brands that run discount-heavy programs often land below both. The goal with this activewear brand was to build an email program where engagement held above both benchmarks without needing to lean on constant promotional incentives to drive it.
~25%
~2.5%
Both beat
THE AUTOMATION
FOUNDATION
62 flows is not a number chosen arbitrarily. Every flow exists because a specific subscriber moment required a specific automated response. The program treats email less like a broadcast channel and more like a CRM.
WELCOME &
ONBOARDING
Welcome sequences, SMS opt-in prompts, and early education flows introduced new subscribers to the brand before they encountered a campaign. First impressions were managed, not left to chance.
BROWSE &
ABANDON
Browse abandonment, cart abandonment, and checkout recovery flows fired on observed behavior. These triggered when it mattered — when a subscriber had shown intent — not on a generic schedule.
POST-PURCHASE
& LOYALTY
Post-purchase sequences, VIP early-access flows, and loyalty acknowledgement turned single buyers into repeat customers without requiring a new campaign send for each interaction.
UNENGAGED PROFILES
HANDLED SYSTEMATICALLY
Before any profile hit a suppression threshold, a win-back flow gave it every opportunity to re-engage. Profiles that didn't respond were removed cleanly — protecting sender reputation and keeping the active list percentage high. This is the part most fashion brands skip, and it's the main reason their deliverability degrades over time.
62
ACTIVE FLOWS
SEGMENTATION
AS STRATEGY
With 62 flows handling the always-on lifecycle work, the 50 campaign sends were reserved for moments that warranted a full broadcast: product drops, seasonal releases, and a limited number of promotional moments tied to real occasions rather than calendar-filling sends.
Each campaign was segmented before it sent. VIP subscribers received early access before the general list. Engaged subscribers received the standard version. Unengaged subscribers — those who hadn't opened in the last 90 days — were excluded entirely, protecting the open rate and the sender domain simultaneously.
Brand voice consistency was enforced across every touchpoint. Fashion email fails when it looks like a different brand each week — inconsistent design, inconsistent tone, inconsistent offer logic. Every send followed the same visual identity and communication style, which is part of why the unsubscribe rate held at 0.349%: subscribers knew what they were getting, and they chose to stay subscribed.
Early access to drops. Exclusive acknowledgement. Different copy tone. Higher-intent audience treated as such.
Standard campaign sends. Consistent cadence. Full campaign access on release day.
Win-back flow triggered. Not included in standard campaign sends until re-engagement is confirmed.
Excluded from campaigns. Suppressed after win-back flow concludes without re-engagement.
THE
DELTA
Quantitative outcomes from 12 months of Klaviyo campaign and flow reporting.
Most email programs beat the open rate benchmark or the click rate benchmark. Beating both simultaneously is significantly harder — especially in fashion, where a subscriber base acquired through discount incentives tends to click less and unsubscribe more as promotional frequency increases.
“Fashion email fails when the list becomes a discount audience. The 62 flows treated each subscriber tier differently from day one. You can't retroactively fix a list trained to expect discounts — you have to build it differently from the start.”OPENRATELAB ANALYSIS
[ DATA_NOTE ] All metrics reflect 12 months of campaign and flow performance pulled directly from the account's Klaviyo reporting. Open rate, click rate, and unsub rate are account-level averages across all sends. Client identity is withheld per our confidentiality standard.
FREQUENTLY ASKED
How do you maintain a 43.3% open rate across 50+ campaigns? [+]
Consistency at that level comes from three disciplines: sending only to engaged segments, writing subject lines that earn the open without relying on discounts, and maintaining a steady send cadence that conditions subscribers to expect and open the email. Fashion audiences are harder to maintain — the novelty factor drops fast if the content doesn't earn attention. The 43.3% average reflects a brand that built an audience that genuinely wanted the content.
Is a 2.86% click rate good for fashion email? [+]
Yes — and more importantly, it's consistent. Industry click rates for fashion typically land between 1.0–2.0%. Sustaining 2.86% across 50 campaigns means the email content was reliably driving action, not just occasional spikes from one-time promotions. That kind of click consistency signals that the copy, creative, and offer were working together across the full campaign set.
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