Klaviyo’s 2026 abandoned cart benchmarks, and what I actually do with them

Klaviyo just dropped its 2026 report on abandoned carts, and there's one number that should make you sit up if you're in eCommerce. The abandoned cart flow generates the highest average revenue per recipient of all your automated flows. $6.77 per recipient on email, $4.48 on SMS. No other flow comes close.

I'm not going to paraphrase the report line by line, you can read it yourself. Instead I'll tell you what I take away from it on the agency side, where I see brands getting it wrong, and what you can do this week.

The abandoned cart, your most profitable flow (and often the most neglected)

Revenue per recipient, RPR, is the number that actually matters in CRM. Not open rate, not the number of emails sent. How much money you generate for each person who enters your flow. And on that front, the abandoned cart crushes everything.

Quick reminder on what it is. An abandoned checkout is someone who gets to payment but doesn't complete it. An abandoned cart is someone who adds a product to the cart but doesn't even reach checkout. Both trigger on a real customer action, and that's exactly what makes them perform so well. You're not bugging some random person, you're following up with someone who showed buying intent an hour earlier.

The thing is, the best-positioned brands, the top 10% of Klaviyo users, hit $13.70 RPR on email and $8.69 on SMS. You double the average result. Between a brand that just plugged in the default flow and one that genuinely worked on it, there's a 2x gap. And in some verticals it's even more brutal. The top 10% in DIY and home improvement pull $35.24 email RPR on abandoned cart. The top 10% in home and garden, $28.76. On electronics, $24.72.

That gap isn't magic. It's flow work.

Stop thinking that plugging in the flow is enough

I still see eCommerce operators running Shopify's default flows and thinking they've ticked the CRM box. Shopify is fine to get started, but you can't personalise anything, you can't segment, you can't add your branding. It's super basic.

The Klaviyo report says it in its own way. Even a basic abandoned cart flow is worth it. But it's continuous optimisation that makes the difference between pulling $6.77 and hitting the top 10%'s $13.70.

Concretely, what separates the two?

• Timing. A first reminder email 2 to 4 hours after abandonment, while intent is still hot. You don't wait until the next day for the first follow-up.
• The sequence. Not a single email, a real series. A simple reminder, then a follow-up 24h later, then a final message around 48h with alternative product recommendations or a feedback request.
• Personalisation. First name in the subject line, and above all the detail of the product the person left in their cart. A generic subject like "you forgot something" converts less than a subject line that names the product.
• The channel mix. Email and SMS working together, not each in its own corner.

SMS, the channel you're probably underusing

The average abandoned cart RPR on SMS is $4.48. Lower than email in absolute terms, but the SMS click rate is 10.3% against 6% for email. People click almost twice as much on an SMS. And the top 10% climbs to $8.69 SMS RPR.

My advice is to stop thinking email OR SMS, and think email AND SMS in a sequence designed together. Reminder email first, SMS follow-up with a small offer after 24h, works really well because you switch channels right when email alone starts running out of steam. In automotive, the average abandoned cart SMS RPR gets close to $11. On high-ticket products, SMS becomes a genuine revenue driver.

Welcome and browse abandonment, the two flows people forget

If I had to point to the mistake I see most often, it's betting everything on the abandoned cart and leaving the other flows abandoned. The Klaviyo report hits exactly on this.

On email, the welcome series beats the abandoned cart on click rate. 6.5% for welcome against 6% for abandoned cart on average. And in the top 10%, 13.3% against 11.3%. The welcome is the flow that greets people signing up for your newsletter, the first touchpoint. If you want to bring down your acquisition cost, that's where you need to put as much care as on your abandoned cart. A well-onboarded new subscriber is a customer who buys faster and more often.

Browse abandonment triggers when someone looks at a product page without adding it to the cart. Long treated as the secondary little flow, it's becoming as important as the abandoned cart in some verticals. In DIY and home improvement, browse abandonment shows a 6.5% click rate, on par with the abandoned cart. On electronics, both email abandonment flows hit 6.3%.

What that means for you. If you sell in these verticals and don't have a browse abandonment flow, you're leaving money on the table. You catch people earlier in their thinking, before they've even added to cart.

What you actually do this week

Enough theory. Here's how I'd prioritise if I took over your CRM account tomorrow morning.

First, check that your abandoned cart flow is actually a series of 3 messages and not a single isolated email. If you've got one email going out, you already have an easy win ahead of you.

Next, look at your current RPR and compare it to the $6.77 on email and $4.48 on SMS. If you're below, you've got a problem to fix. If you're above, aim for the top 10% in your vertical, that's where the real delta sits.

Plug SMS into the sequence if you haven't already. The 10.3% click rate alone justifies the test, especially if you sell high-cart products.

Start A/B testing your subject lines. Version A generic, version B with the first name and the name of the abandoned product. Let it run, keep the version that converts best. It's basic but it's what separates an average brand from a top 10% brand.

And stop neglecting your welcome and browse abandonment. The abandoned cart is your king flow, but the 2026 benchmarks clearly show that a good flow mix brings in more than a single overbuilt flow.

At OMOSA, we aim for a simple target: with CRM done right, marketing automation should bring you at least 30% of your revenue. If you're below that, it's money you're losing every month. The Klaviyo report, for its part, gives you the benchmarks to know where you stand. It's on you to close the gap.