2026 Abandoned Cart Benchmark Report

Abandoned cart flows make you money, more than any other automated flow you set up.

That’s what Klaviyo’s product analytics team discovered when they analyzed over 110,000 Klaviyo customers across industries to gather data on abandoned cart open rates, click rates, revenue per recipient (RPR), and more.

In this report, we compare abandoned cart flow metrics for the average ecommerce brand to abandoned cart flow metrics for brands performing in the top 10% of Klaviyo users.

What you’ll find is that even a basic abandoned cart flow is worth your time and effort, but that optimizing your abandoned cart and overall flow channel mix can pay off even more.

For an in-depth analysis of other flows and campaigns across email and text message marketing, download Klaviyo’s 2026 Omnichannel Benchmark Report. Here, let’s dive into a few of the most exciting findings about abandoned cart flows specifically.

Abandoned cart flows drive the highest RPR across email and text messaging

If you’re looking for a single flow to set up to drive revenue, you’ll find it in the abandoned cart series: abandoned cart flows drive the highest average RPR of all flows, for both email ($6.77) and text messaging ($4.48).

• Top-performing 10% abandoned cart email flow RPR: $13.70 (3.24% higher than the second-highest RPR flow, the welcome flow)
• Top-performing 10% abandoned cart text message flow RPR: $8.69 (22.91% higher than the second-highest RPR flow, the welcome flow)

These rates are attractive even at their average, but some industries have even more exciting abandoned cart results.

The home & garden and hardware & home improvement industries, for example, report an average abandoned cart RPR around $15 for email, and the automotive industry reports an average RPR of close to $11 for text message abandoned cart flows.

For the top-performing 10% of brands, abandoned cart flow RPR is even more impressive for email:

• Top-performing 10% of hardware & home improvement: $35.24
• Top-performing 10% of home & garden: $28.76
• Top-performing 10% of automotive: $27.48
• Top-performing 10% of electronics: $24.72

And for text messaging:

• Top-performing 10% of hardware & home improvement: $28.27
• Top-performing 10% of automotive: $18.77
• Top-performing 10% of electronics: $17.72
• Top-performing 10% of home & garden: $16.57

This is good news across industries, as it shows high abandoned cart flow RPR on both items people need, like furniture, as well as leisure and luxury items, like fancy tech gadgets.

Abandoned cart emails come in second to the email welcome series for engagement

For email, the average click rate for the abandoned cart flow is 6%, whereas it’s 6.5% for the welcome series. The top-performing 10% of brands see a click rate of 11.3% for the abandoned cart email flow, compared to 13.3% for the welcome series.

For text messaging, the abandoned cart flow yields more engagement than the welcome series, but barely. The average click rate for the abandoned cart text is 10.3%, whereas it’s a close 10% for the welcome series. The top-performing 10% of brands see a click rate of 18.5% for the abandoned cart text flow, compared to 18.3% for the welcome series.

2026 data indicates it’s just as important to lock in your welcome series as it is your abandoned cart flows, no matter the channel. If one of your goals this year is lowering customer acquisition costs, a great place to start is to treat your omnichannel welcome series strategy with the same level of thought and care as your abandoned cart flows.

Browse abandonment emails are just as important for engagement in some industries

Despite slightly higher engagement from the welcome series, the abandoned cart email flow still consistently drives high click rates across all industries. This suggests that no matter what industry you’re operating in, an abandoned cart flow is an absolute must.

But for some industries, the browse abandonment flow is becoming almost or just as important as the abandoned cart for engagement:

• The home & garden industry has the highest average abandoned cart email click rate (6.5%), compared to a browse abandonment click rate of 5.8%. For the home & garden industry, the abandoned cart is still more important than their browse abandonment flow.
• The hardware & home improvement industry also clocks an above-average click rate (6.4%) for their abandoned cart email flow. But what’s interesting here is that browse abandonment flows average a 6.5% click rate, suggesting that flow is at least as important for engagement.
• For the electronics industry, both email abandonment flows have an average click rate of 6.3%.
• The automotive industry has a below-average click rate of 5.7% for their abandoned cart email flow, but their browse abandonment flow sees a 6% click rate above the 5.6% average across all verticals.

Given what we’re seeing comparatively across email flows for the abandoned cart, browse abandonment, and welcome series, the data suggests it’s important to invest your resources in a diversity of flows.

Note that this logic doesn’t necessarily hold for text messages. When compared to browse abandonment, the abandoned cart still comes out on top for click rate across all industries, even though welcome series engagement sees higher engagement in some verticals.

Key takeaways to measure and optimize your abandoned cart performance

While every brand is different, performance metrics like these will help you gauge whether your abandoned cart flow is knocking it out of the park, doing fine as is, or needs some work to improve.

Once you understand what kind of benchmarks your abandoned cart flow could achieve in an ideal world, you’ll be better equipped to track and measure your flow’s performance so that you can start answering questions like:

How many messages should be in my abandoned cart flow?

The answer depends on your industry, product line, and business goals, but a common sequence might involve 3 messages: a simple email reminder after 2–4 hours, a follow-up text message with a discount after 24 hours, and a final message after 48 hours that includes alternative product recommendations or asks for feedback.

What should my abandoned cart flow subject line say?

Again, this depends, but a good place to start is personalizing your subject line or text message by including the recipient’s first name and details about the products they left behind in their cart.

You can also outsource this thinking to an AI marketing agent that’s trained on the real-time customer data in your CRM. It can make relevant suggestions for personalizing your subject lines or text messages based on real customer behavior and preferences.

What channel should my abandoned cart message go out on first?

It depends on what your customer is most likely to engage with. With AI-powered channel affinity, you can automatically send abandoned cart messages to shoppers on the channel they’re most likely to engage with next, based on historical behavioral data.

AI-powered channel affinity ranks each customer’s top channels in order of preference. Use it to increase revenue for your abandoned cart flows simply by following people’s channel preferences.

Does my abandoned cart flow need to include a discount?

Not necessarily. While discounts are a strong incentive for encouraging shoppers to complete a purchase, they can also work against you by training shoppers to wait for a discount before buying. Consider segmenting high-value carts and only offering an incentive on those where you stand to make more revenue from a single purchase.

Test and audit your abandoned cart flow with AI

The best way to answer these questions for your brand? “Test, test, test,” says Tim Akers, founder of Akers Digital. “The ability to A/B test flows is critical. Test out different offers and the timing of the sequence to see what version works best for your brand.”

“It’s an iterative process where we’re continuing to review how things are performing and then taking an educated guess and saying, ‘OK, we think if we tweak this specific thing, that it’s going to move this specific needle,’” says Sean Donahue, director of email marketing at nationally recognized digital marketing agency Power Digital.

Then, Donahue adds, “We make that change, see what happens, and just continue that process over and over again.”

Testing and auditing is something AI is great at, too. Composer, your always-on AI marketing agent built into Klaviyo B2C CRM, knows your brand, your products, and, most importantly, your customers. It helps you uncover opportunities, understand what matters, and decide what to do next.

As a next step, ask Composer to audit your abandoned cart flow to identify where customers are dropping off and get suggestions for what to improve. With Composer, you can uncover opportunities to A/B test you may not have previously thought of.

After that, Composer can help build a better version of your abandoned cart flow, across channels, using your brand context and customer data throughout the process.

Build better abandoned cart emails with Klaviyo.