Klaviyo SMS vs email for ecommerce: which drives more revenue?

If you run an ecommerce store on Shopify, you have probably asked yourself whether to push your marketing budget into email or SMS. Both live inside Klaviyo and both can drive revenue, but they earn it in different ways, and a campaign on the wrong channel wastes budget.

Klaviyo's 2026 Omnichannel Benchmark Report draws on data from more than 110,000 brands, and the email and SMS benchmark pages Klaviyo published from it show the two channels doing different jobs. The figures below come from those pages, read on 2 October 2026, alongside what each channel costs and how to run both without doubling your workload.

Email and SMS earn their money in different ways

Klaviyo is the platform, but email and SMS have fundamentally different economics and behaviour. Email is a high-volume, low-cost channel that builds relationships over time. SMS is immediate, personal, and expensive but it converts at rates email rarely touches.

According to Klaviyo's email benchmarks, email flows deliver over three times higher click rates than campaigns (5.58 per cent versus 1.69 per cent) and 13 times higher placed order rates. The difference is relevance: flows are triggered by behaviour, campaigns are sent to a list. That gap tells you something about how your customers respond to timing.

SMS conversion rates are harder to pin down. Sakari, which sells SMS software, says SMS conversion rates land between 21 and 30 per cent across studies, nearly double the 10 to 15 per cent it gives for email, but it does not name the studies or say what counts as a conversion. Klaviyo's own SMS benchmark page reports order rates by industry in an interactive chart, and its written summary sticks to click rates and revenue per recipient, which are the figures in the table below. SMS also costs more per message than email and carries a higher unsubscribe risk if you overuse it.

Klaviyo email: flows carry the revenue

Email is the workhorse of ecommerce marketing. Klaviyo's strength is in its segmentation and flow builder, letting you trigger emails based on what customers do rather than sending the same message to everyone.

Here is how the two channels compare on the figures Klaviyo publishes for each. Klaviyo shows revenue in dollars without naming the currency on its benchmark pages.

Klaviyo 2026 benchmark	Email	SMS
Flows' share of sends	5.3%	7.6%
Flows' share of channel revenue	Nearly 41%	45.2%
Flow click rate	5.58%, against 1.69% for campaigns	Nearing 10%, almost double campaigns
Flow revenue per recipient against campaigns	Nearly 18 times higher	About 8 times higher
Top 10% of flows	Revenue per recipient as high as $7.79, click rates over 10%	Revenue per recipient above $5, top click rates above 16%
Flow revenue from new buyers	Nearly 48%, against 16% for campaigns	64.4%, against 20% for campaigns

Darkroom, a retention agency, puts welcome flows at open rates of 40 to 60 per cent and conversion rates of 8 to 12 per cent, based on its own portfolio of more than 50 ecommerce brands on Klaviyo, and it warns that average open rates are inflated by Apple's Mail Privacy Protection. Darkroom also breaks flow revenue down by brand size: under $5 million in revenue, flows typically bring in 25 to 35 per cent of total email revenue; between $5 million and $20 million that climbs to 40 to 50 per cent; and mature programmes above $20 million reach 50 to 60 per cent. The share keeps climbing because campaigns need constant manual effort, while a flow keeps earning once it is built.

Where email earns its place

Where email shines is depth. You can tell a story, explain a product, share a customer review, and build trust over a sequence of messages. A welcome series can be five emails over two weeks. An abandoned cart flow can send three reminders with increasing urgency. Email gives you the space to do that without feeling intrusive.

We covered how to build AI email nurture workflows with Claude and HubSpot in a previous post, and the same principles apply to Klaviyo flows. The tool changes but the strategy is the same: send the right message at the right time, informed by behaviour.

Klaviyo SMS: fewer sends, more revenue per message

SMS behaves differently. People read a text within seconds of it arriving, and they either act on it or ignore it.

Klaviyo's own SMS marketing benchmarks put flow-based SMS click rates at close to 10 per cent on average, almost double what campaign sends achieve. SMS flows earn about eight times the revenue per recipient of SMS campaigns on average, and the top 10 per cent of SMS flows reach a revenue per recipient above $5. Klaviyo credits that top tier to frequency, segmentation and personalised content, with high send volume doing less.

The cost and compliance catch

The catch is cost and compliance. SMS costs more per message than email, and the rules for who you can text, and from what sender, differ by country. In Australia, every branded (alphanumeric) sender ID had to be registered under the ACMA's Sender ID framework by 1 July 2026, according to Klaviyo's guide to the new rules. Klaviyo's help centre adds that the registration goes through Klaviyo, even for brands that registered with a previous SMS provider, and that it has to be done before you start collecting SMS consent. Check the consent and opt-out rules for every country on your list before the first send.

What SMS is actually for

SMS works best for:

• Cart abandonment reminders with a time-limited discount
• Flash sale announcements
• Order updates and shipping notifications
• Exclusive VIP offers
• Event reminders and appointment confirmations

It works poorly for educational content and long product descriptions, because a text has room for one idea and one link. If a message needs a paragraph of explanation before the link makes sense, send it by email.

When to use each channel

The decision comes down to intent and timing.

Use email when the goal is education, relationship building, or nurturing over time. Welcome sequences, post-purchase follow-ups, newsletter content, and product education all belong in email. You have the space to build a case and the customer is in a reading mindset.

Use SMS when the goal is immediate action. A cart sitting for three hours, a flash sale closing tonight, or a low-stock alert all benefit from SMS because the customer sees it now. SMS turns intent into revenue within minutes.

The cost difference matters. Email costs near zero per send. SMS costs cents per message. If you send a weekly newsletter via SMS, you will burn through your marketing budget and your subscriber list simultaneously. If you never send an SMS, you are ignoring the customers who want to hear from you on their phone.

Email costs per contact, SMS costs per message

The two channels are billed on completely different axes. Klaviyo's email pricing scales with your active profile count, and the included send capacity grows as you move up the tiers, so once a list sits inside a plan, the next campaign to that list costs almost nothing extra. SMS is billed per message, and the price depends on the message type and where it goes, which turns every text you add to a flow into a variable cost. Klaviyo's free plan covers up to 250 active profiles, 500 email sends a month and USD 5 of mobile messages a month, according to Klaviyo's pricing page on 2 October 2026.

Line the two billing models up and the practical rule falls out of the numbers.

Billing detail	Email	SMS
What drives the cost	Active profiles, with sends riding along with the plan	Message spend, charged per message
Free plan allowance	500 sends a month, up to 250 active profiles	USD 5 of mobile messages a month
Cost of one more send	Effectively nothing inside the allowance	More message spend, priced by destination and message type
What changes month to month	List size	Sending volume and where messages go

Budget SMS the way you would any metered line item. Decide in advance how many texts a customer can receive in a month, check what those messages cost for your destination countries in Klaviyo's mobile message pricing, and hold the result as a ceiling. The cap does double duty, keeping the bill predictable while enforcing the frequency discipline that keeps the subscriber list alive.

The same accounting applies on the return side. Klaviyo's benchmarks put the top 10 per cent of email flows at a revenue per recipient as high as $7.79 and the top 10 per cent of SMS flows above $5. A send earns its place when its return clears its cost, so compare what your own flows return per recipient with what the planned sends cost to deliver, and let that comparison decide how far SMS spreads into the mix.

The hybrid approach: both channels together

Klaviyo lets a single flow use both channels. A hybrid abandoned cart flow might look like this:

1. Email 1 (1 hour): Reminder of what was left behind, with product image and link
2. SMS (3 hours): Short text with a discount code if they order in the next 24 hours
3. Email 2 (24 hours): Social proof, reviews, or restock fear
4. SMS (48 hours): Final offer, expiring soon

Klaviyo makes this straightforward because both channels live in the same flow builder. You set the trigger once, add conditional splits based on whether the customer has opted in to SMS, and configure each message in its own channel.

This approach gives you the reach of email with the urgency of SMS, and it avoids the biggest mistake of each channel: email that is too slow, and SMS that is too frequent.

For a deeper look at cart recovery specifically, see our guide on building a cart abandonment recovery agent with Claude and n8n.

Where the hybrid approach usually goes wrong

Running both channels in one programme can go wrong in a few ways, and each one is easy to design out before you build.

Both channels fire on the same trigger

The most common mistake is wiring email and SMS to the same behaviour without a suppression rule between them. A customer abandons a cart, and within ten minutes gets an email and a text saying the same thing. It reads as one brand not talking to itself. The fix is a delay and a condition: let one channel go first, wait long enough to see whether it worked, and only fire the second if the first did not convert.

SMS frequency creeps up because it works

SMS converts well, so the temptation is to send more of it. That is the trap. Unlike email, where a low-value send is mildly annoying, a low-value text feels like an intrusion, and the unsubscribe is permanent and immediate. The channel punishes overuse faster than it rewards volume. A useful discipline is to decide in advance how many texts a customer can receive in a month and treat that number as a hard budget.

Nobody owns the combined view

Email and SMS are usually reported separately, which makes it easy to double count. If an email and a text both touched a customer before purchase, both reports will happily claim the revenue. Before you scale a hybrid programme, agree how credit is split, or you will end up making budget decisions on numbers that add up to more than you actually sold.

Start with email, add SMS where minutes matter

Start with email. Build a solid flow-based email programme first, because email gives you the highest ROI for the lowest cost. Focus on welcome flows, abandoned cart recovery, and post-purchase sequences. Measure flow revenue as a percentage of total email revenue. Darkroom's benchmark for mature programmes is 50 to 60 per cent, and Klaviyo's average across its brands is nearly 41 per cent.

Once your email flows are running well, add SMS for the specific moments where immediacy matters. Cart reminders that have not converted after a few hours, flash sales, and VIP offers work well. Set up each SMS message as a conditional branch inside an existing email flow, so it only fires when the email has not done the job.

And keep your lists segmented. Klaviyo's power is in behavioural segmentation. A customer who buys monthly should receive different messages, on both channels, than someone who visited once and left. The channel choice matters less than the relevance of the message, but getting both right compounds the effect.

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