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2026

The Marketing Orchestration Benchmark

by

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Email marketing is the foundation of your customer relationships. But untargerted volume creates fatigue. This interactive benchmark shows you how your email program stacks up and reveals how top brands distribute marketing pressure across SMS, Push, WhatsApp, and Wallet.

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Executive summary

Email is the foundation
but not the entire relationship

As businesses scale, they tend to overload email. The result? Inbox competition rises and engagement drops. This benchmark answers two critical questions:

1. Is your foundational email channel healthy?
Compare your stats against 30,000+ brands.

2. Are you piling up channels, or orchestrating them?
See how top teams assign specific 'Jobs to be Done' to complementary channels when email isn't the right tool.

Key Findings

The biggest trends shaping engagement in 2026

  1. The Email Baseline: Email remains the anchor, but high-volume senders (≥1M/year) are seeing drops in CTR as inbox competition peaks.

  2. SMS as core channel for Urgency: SMS volume spikes exactly when inbox competition is highest. It’s not a duplicate channel; it’s an emergency bypass.

  3. The Shift to Engagement: Push acts as a steady, real-time engager, while Mobile Wallet is surging as a silent loyalty driver (+43% YoY).

  4. The Bottom Line: Brands don’t win with email alone; they protect it by assigning each channel a specific job.

Want actionable strategies to fix your channel pile-up?
Download the Orchestration Playbook
Email marketing

Benchmark
your performance

See how your program compares and where untapped potential awaits.

The foundation for customer relationships: Email Marketing

Benchmarking your KPIs helps you spot early signs of inbox fatigue.
Use the filters below to compare your performance by industry, then scroll down to see how top teams relieve email pressure using other channels.
i
What do these metrics mean?
Open rate
Measures initial attention and subject line effectiveness.
Open rate = Emails opened ÷ emails delivered x 100
Apple MPP open rate
Open rate proxy to account for Apple's Mail Privacy Protection (which pre-fetches emails), providing a comparative baseline for true audience engagement in a privacy-first world.
(Emails opened + Apple MPP-bot activities) / Delivered * 100
Click-through rate (CTR)
CTR is the number of emails delivered that received at least one click - a true indicator of intent and content relevance. It is the most reliable starting point for measuring active interest.
Click-through rate = Emails clicked ÷ emails delivered x 100
Unsubscribe rate
Your fatigue signal. A rising unsubscribe rate is your earliest warning sign of over-communication and inbox burnout.
Unsubscribe rate = Total unsubscribes ÷ emails delivered x 100
"The teams that maintain strong engagement treat list quality as a KPI. Past 100K subscribers, you need engagement-based segmentation."
Black and white portrait of a smiling man in a white shirt and dark jacket against a plain background.
Will Pearson
Co-Founder & Co-CEO at Scalero
How do the top 10% orchestrate success?
Download the full report to find out
Emails Sent
Open Rate
Click-through rate
Unsubscribe Rate
Inbox pressure: How volume affects engagement
When email is your only channel, it absorbs all your marketing pressure. As seasonal volume rises, attention becomes harder to earn. The brands that thrive actively offload specific messaging to secondary channels to protect their email deliverability.
Emails Sent
Open Rate
Click-through rate
Unsubscribe
Black and white portrait of a smiling man in a white shirt and dark jacket against a plain background.
Yohann Delahaye
Managing Director at Avanci
"When increasing your send frequency generates a drop in revenue per email and an exponential rise in unsubscribes... you don't need more emails; you need an omnichannel strategy."
Black and white portrait of a smiling man in a white shirt and dark jacket against a plain background.
Yohann Delahaye
Managing Director at Avanci

Channel expansion: Moving beyond the inbox

Each channel has unique strengths for building experiences and relationships. The graphs below show which industries are adopting SMS, WhatsApp, push notifications, and mobile wallets to balance email pressure and create new moments.
"Adopting new communication channels offers several key levers:‍
‍• Optimizing communication frequency
‍‍• High read rates (SMS and WhatsApp)‍
‍• The opportunity to create a genuine two-way conversational exchange with customers‍
‍• The overall improvement of the customer experience."
Black and white portrait of a smiling man in a white shirt and dark jacket against a plain background.
Guillaume Demonsant
Head of Sales at Dentsu
01

SMS: High-impact immediacy

SMS is instant and familiar. Where email carries deep context (brand stories, long content), SMS excels at short-form updates.
Businesses using SMS by industry
Who uses it: Broad adoption, but spikes in Retail, Healthcare, and Logistics where speed and certainty are non-negotiable.
Total SMS messages sent per month
When they use it: Highly seasonal. Brands use SMS to share urgent updates exactly when email inboxes are overflowing.
"We use email to explain, nurture the relationship, and create value; we use SMS to follow up, remind, or trigger immediate action."
Black and white portrait of a smiling man in a white shirt and dark jacket against a plain background.
Hervé Malinge
Head of CRM at Yuri & Neil
02

Push notifications: Always-on engagement

While SMS is for high-stakes urgency, push notifications (web, mobile, in-app) are built for utility and habit. It handles constant, low-friction updates (shipping statuses, behavioral triggers) that would otherwise clutter an inbox.
Businesses using push notifications by industry
Who uses it: Retail, E-commerce, and IT lead adoption, relying on it for continuous micro-engagements.
Black and white portrait of a smiling man in a white shirt and dark jacket against a plain background.
Sabrina Villepinte
Data & Marketing Manager at Elevate Agency
"For browse abandonment, a single SMS fires after 5 to 6 hours if an email is ignored. If they click but still don't convert, a push notification fires the next morning, catching the 'I meant to go back to it' behavior. We're following their silence and responding to it."
Total push notifications sent per month
When they use it: Steady year-round. Top performers use frequency caps and behavioral triggers to create an always-on utility layer, avoiding seasonal promo blasts.
03

WhatsApp: Creating conversations in real time

You can’t have a real-time conversation over email. WhatsApp absorbs two-way friction, allowing brands to instantly capture intent and resolve queries.
Businesses using WhatsApp by industry
Who uses it: Healthcare and Education lead due to the need for high-trust, two-way communication.
Total WhatsApp messages sent per month
When they use it: Transactional volume is steady, but promotional volume spikes in Q4 to guarantee visibility and instant replies during peak competition.
04
Mobile wallet: The loyalty accelerator
Digital passes (Apple/Google Wallet) create an always-accessible touchpoint that never competes for inbox attention. Wallet cards drive an average retention rate of 95% and 52% higher revenue per customer.
Businesses using mobile wallet by industry
Who uses it: Fashion & Retail lead (30.8%), primarily for loyalty programs and location‑aware in-store offers.
Total mobile wallet push notifications sent per month
When they use it: Peak volume hits in Q4 to drive high-intent loyalty redemption when email saturation is highest.
Ready to orchestrate your pressure valves?
You’ve seen the symptoms of channel pile-up. Now get the cure. Download the benchmark to access our 'Jobs to be Done' Orchestration Playbook and to discover the full analysis, exact strategies, and partner insights top brands use to stop blasting and start orchestrating.
Download the Full Report & Playbook

Learn more about our featured experts

Black and white portrait of a bearded man with short hair wearing a dark jacket over a light shirt against a dark background.
Guillaume Demonsant
Head of Sales at Dentsu
Black and white portrait of a smiling man wearing a white shirt and dark blazer against a plain background.
Hervé Malinge
Head of CRM at Yuri & Neil
Smiling woman with long wavy brown hair wearing a black top and a gold necklace.
Sabrina Villepinte
Data & Marketing Manager at Elevate Agency
Smiling man with short curly brown hair and a beard, wearing a green jacket and dark shirt, outdoors with blurred natural background.
Will Pearson
Co-founder & Co-CEO at Scalero
Man with glasses wearing a white shirt and crossing his arms against a plain grey background.
Yohann Delahaye
Managing Director at Avanci
How we built this benchmark

Methodology

This benchmark is built on aggregated, anonymized messaging data from over 50,000 active Brevo customers across 2025. We calculated unweighted averages and eliminated extreme outliers to give you a realistic, baseline view of typical performance. By analyzing active senders across all channels, this report provides a reflection of how modern marketing pressure is being distributed today.

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