54.8% OPEN RATE
AT SERIOUS SCALE
203 campaigns. 205 active flows. 2.5 million email delivers. The open rate held at 54.8% across all of it.
THE
ACCOUNT
A health and supplement brand with a large, active subscriber base and a leadership team that understood email was their most profitable channel. When we took over the account, the infrastructure existed but the results were inconsistent. Some campaigns performed. Most underperformed. The automation side was almost untouched.
The goal was straightforward: make the entire email program reliable — not just the occasional good send, but every send, every flow, every automated touchpoint — while growing send volume to match the size of the list.
203
205
2.5M
THE
PROBLEM
Scale kills open rates. This is the most predictable pattern in email marketing: as a brand grows its list and increases send frequency, engagement numbers start to drop. Deliverability softens. Inbox placement gets less reliable. Open rates that once hit 40% start drifting toward 20%.
At 203 campaigns per year — nearly four broadcasts per week — and 2.5 million total sends, this account had every condition required for engagement collapse. A large, aging list. High send frequency. No systematic suppression. Automation that wasn't doing enough lifecycle work to offset campaign fatigue.
The industry benchmark for open rate sits at 25%. Most large health and supplement brands operating at this volume land between 22% and 30%. The question wasn't whether this account could beat that benchmark — it was by how much, and whether that performance could be sustained across a full year of high-volume sending.
Sending nearly four campaigns per week to a large list without a rigorous segmentation and suppression system means every inbox provider — Gmail, Yahoo, Apple — starts flagging the sending domain. Open rates fall, then deliverability falls with them. The two problems compound. That was the risk this program had to solve.
THE SYSTEM
Four interconnected decisions made the open rate hold at scale. Any one of them alone wouldn't have been enough.
EVERY SEND
TO THE RIGHT SEGMENT
No broadcast to the full list. Every campaign defined its intended audience before a single word was written. Engaged-only segments, purchaser vs. non-purchaser splits, recency windows — the segmentation logic was built into the send process, not applied as an afterthought.
SUPPRESSION
BEFORE DISENGAGEMENT
Profiles that hadn't engaged in 90+ days were funneled into a re-engagement flow before any suppression decision was made. The flow gave them every opportunity to come back. Profiles that didn't re-engage were suppressed — protecting deliverability and keeping the engaged-list percentage high.
205 FLOWS — THE
LIFECYCLE FULLY COVERED
With 205 automated flows running in parallel, the automated side of the program handled every customer lifecycle stage: welcome, browse abandonment, cart abandonment, post-purchase, replenishment reminders, win-back, VIP, lapsed purchaser. This meant campaigns could be reserved for moments that genuinely warranted a full broadcast — not used as a substitute for automation.
TESTED.
NOT GUESSED.
WHAT 205
FLOWS MEANS
205 active automated flows is not a vanity number. Each flow exists because a specific moment in the customer lifecycle required a specific response that a broadcast campaign cannot deliver. Automation at this depth means the program is always running — subscriber segments that would otherwise go untouched between campaign sends are being worked by flows in the background.
The flow architecture covered three primary areas. Acquisition-stage flows handled new subscribers, welcome sequences, and early education about the product range. Behavioral flows triggered on browse activity, add-to-cart events, and abandoned checkouts. Retention flows managed post-purchase, replenishment cadences, loyalty tiers, and win-back for lapsed buyers.
The result: the average flow open rate held at 35.3%. That's 35% of automated email recipients engaging with emails they didn't ask for, triggered by behavior they exhibited. It validated the relevance of the automation triggers and the quality of the copy inside each flow.
35.3%
INDUSTRY AVG: 25%205
FULL LIFECYCLE COVERAGETHE
DELTA
Quantitative outcomes from 12 months of Klaviyo campaign and flow reporting.
A 54.8% average open rate across 2.5 million delivers is not an anomaly. It held across the full year, through 203 campaign sends, at nearly four sends per week. The click rate of 3.67% represents 67% above the industry benchmark of 2.5%.
“Volume without infrastructure kills deliverability. The 205 flows and the suppression system meant the campaigns were only landing in inboxes that wanted them.”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 flow data are account-level averages. Client identity is withheld per our confidentiality standard.
FREQUENTLY ASKED
What does running 205 Klaviyo flows look like in practice? [+]
It means every meaningful subscriber behaviour has an automated response — not just the obvious ones like welcome and cart abandonment, but product-specific educational sequences, conditional win-back paths, post-purchase educational content, and VIP-tier journeys. The flows weren't built all at once. They were added incrementally over 12+ months as each new trigger was validated against engagement data.
How do you maintain high open rates at 2.5 million email volume? [+]
Strict list segmentation. At that volume, you can't send everything to everyone — deliverability depends on inbox providers seeing consistent positive signals from each send. We segment by engagement tier and only send high-volume campaigns to contacts who have demonstrated they open and click. The 54.8% average open rate across 203 campaigns reflects that discipline: fewer people receiving each send, more of them actually engaging.
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