BFCM Email Benchmarks
Email is the highest-margin channel of BFCM. There is no ad spend behind a send, no auction to win, just a list you already own and a message you control. But "good" is hard to judge without something to measure against, and most brands head into the season with no real sense of what strong email performance actually looks like.
This post lays out the benchmarks that matter during BFCM across three numbers: email open rate, click rate, and revenue per send. We will cover what the typical ecommerce brand sees, and then what our own client sends delivered last Cyber 5. As with everything in email, the story is less about any single metric and more about where the real revenue comes from.
What a strong email open rate looks like
The open rate is the first signal of email health. It reflects how well your subject lines and, more importantly, your sender reputation earn a place in a crowded inbox. For ecommerce, campaign open rates typically land around 30 to 40%, with automated flow emails running higher, roughly 35 to 45%. Flows tend to outperform because they are triggered by something the subscriber just did, so they arrive when interest is highest.
One honest caveat worth knowing: open rates have been inflated across the board since Apple's Mail Privacy Protection began auto-loading images, so the true number may sit several points below what the platform reports. That is true for every brand, which is why opens are a useful floor but not the metric to judge a season on. For reference, across our client accounts last Cyber 5, campaign open rates averaged about 61% and flow open rates about 52%, both comfortably above the ecommerce benchmark, which tells us the lists were warm and the sender reputation was strong heading into the highest-volume week of the year.
What a strong email click rate looks like
Clicks are where intent actually shows up. An open means the subject line worked; a click means the message and the offer connected. For ecommerce, campaign click rates generally run between 1 and 2%, while flow click rates sit higher, around 3 to 5%, again because triggered emails reach people in a buying moment.
Across our client sends last Cyber 5, campaign click rates came in around 1.3%, right in line with a healthy benchmark, and flow click rates reached about 4.4%, near the top of the typical range. The gap between those two numbers is the important part. Flows earned more than three times the click rate of campaigns, which points directly to where the revenue concentrates during BFCM.
What revenue per send actually looks like
This is the number that matters most, and it is also the one that reveals the biggest gap between brands. Not all sends are worth the same. In 2025, automated emails generated an average of $2.87 per email, compared to just $0.18 for scheduled campaigns, meaning a well-built flow can earn around 16 times more per send than a one-off broadcast. Put another way, automated emails made up only about 2% of total sends but drove roughly 30% of all email revenue.
That is the real lesson of BFCM email economics. The brands getting the most back are not simply sending more campaigns. They are leaning on flows that fire automatically at the moment a subscriber is most likely to buy. Across our client accounts, email contributed roughly $150,000 in revenue over the Cyber 5 window, and the flow engagement above shows why: the automated sends were quietly doing the heaviest lifting while the campaigns drove reach. A brand measuring only campaign performance would miss where most of the money was actually made.
The difference is flows and a warm list
Strong benchmarks do not come from better subject lines alone. They come from preparation, and two things in particular. The first is having your flows live and tested well before November, so your welcome, abandoned checkout, and browse abandonment sequences are already working the moment BFCM traffic arrives. Those are the sends earning the high per-email revenue above, and a flow switched on during Black Friday has already missed the days of traffic that came before it.
The second is a warm, engaged list. Growing your list and sending consistently to your most engaged subscribers in the weeks beforehand is what protects your inbox placement when volume spikes, and it is the reason open rates hold strong during the busiest sending week of the year. The brands that clear these benchmarks are the ones who did the quiet work in October, not the ones who wrote their first send the week of the sale.
Benchmarks are the floor, preparation is what clears them
The numbers here give you a yardstick: 30 to 40% campaign opens, 1 to 2% campaign clicks, and a sharp premium on every automated send over every broadcast. But the brands that beat these benchmarks during BFCM all share the same habit. They walked in with their flows live, their list warm, and their sends planned, instead of scrambling once the season was already underway.
That is exactly the kind of preparation we handle for our clients, from the flows that run automatically to the campaign calendar that carries the weekend. Want your BFCM email built to beat these benchmarks? Book a call with our team.