Email and SMS for food and drink brands: the 2026 Klaviyo benchmarks and where the money actually is

Most food and drink stores treat email as a newsletter and SMS as a Black Friday blast. Both are the least valuable things you can do with either channel. The money is in the messages that send themselves, triggered by what a customer just did, and the 2026 benchmarks show the gap plainly.

What email does for food and drink

Klaviyo's 2026 benchmarks, drawn from its own customer base, put food and beverage campaign emails at roughly a 31% open rate and a click rate of about 1.7%. The placed-order rate on campaigns sits around a quarter of one per cent, which is one order for every 400 emails sent.

The same data puts automated flows at a placed-order rate several times higher. Klaviyo's main benchmark page shows food and beverage conversion at 1.16% for campaigns and 1.79% for flows; its UK page shows a wider gap on some measures. The exact figures move with the report, the direction does not: a flow that fires because someone just did something beats a campaign sent because it is Tuesday.

What SMS does

Klaviyo's SMS data, updated in September 2026 across 183,000 accounts, puts campaign click rates at 5.6% and automated flow click rates at 9.65%, with flows converting about seven times more often than campaigns.

Postscript's data from 17,000 Shopify stores gives the revenue picture: a median of about $0.98 per message, a 25th percentile of $0.41 and a 90th percentile of $4.54. Back-in-stock texts, which only go to people who asked, click at 36% to 58%.

Omnisend's figures are lower across the board, which is a reminder that these are vendor datasets with different customers and different ways of counting a conversion. Use them for direction, and measure your own store.

The four flows, in order

If a food and drink store has nothing automated, this is the order to build in. Each one pays for the next.

1. Welcome, with the first order in it

Someone gives an email address for a discount. The welcome flow sends the code, then two more emails over a week about the product, the story and the reviews. The job is the first order, and this flow usually has the highest conversion of any message the store sends.

2. Abandoned basket

A basket left at the delivery step is a buyer who was surprised by shipping, nine times out of ten. The first message within an hour, plain, with the basket and the delivery promise. A second the next day. For food, a third with a review of the product they left.

3. Post-purchase

Dispatch, delivery, and three days after delivery a message asking how it was and inviting a review. Reviews are the content that sells the next order, and food brands that do not ask do not get them.

4. The reorder reminder

The one food and drink has that almost nobody else does. A pack of biltong, a bag of coffee, a case of anything lasts a predictable number of days. A text the day before it runs out, with a one-tap reorder, is the highest-converting message in the business. The 2026 repeat-purchase benchmarks put food and drink reorder windows at three to five weeks, and roughly two thirds of the year's repeat orders in the first thirty days. Time the message to the pack, not to the calendar.

Then campaigns

Once the four flows are live, campaigns are for news: a new product, a seasonal box, a genuine offer. Twice a month is plenty. Every campaign that goes to the whole list dilutes the next one.

Consent, kept properly

SMS and email both run on consent, and both lose it fast when abused. One-tap opt-out on every message, honoured the same day across every channel. Texts only during the day. No text that could have been an email.

The one person

Email and SMS are usually "someone else's" job in a food and drink store, next to the ads freelancer and the agency that built the site, and the flows above sit half built for a year. We run the ads, the site, and email and SMS as one plan, with one person responsible for whether the store grows. The audit is free: every flow, what is firing, what is not, and the three changes we would make first.

Sources

Klaviyo email marketing benchmarks 2026, UK and main benchmark pages; Klaviyo SMS benchmarks updated September 2026, 183,000 accounts; Postscript SMS benchmarks, 17,000 Shopify stores, 2025 data; Omnisend 2026 ecommerce statistics. Repeat windows: 2026 repeat-purchase benchmark compilations for food and beverage. Vendor datasets, measured differently; read November 2026.