Most merchants judge retention tactics by how confident the vendor sounds, but the only numbers anyone can actually check come from published e-commerce sales data and open email benchmark tables, and those two sources settle less than people assume.
Most merchants pick a retention strategy because a vendor sounds sure of itself, not because a number backs the claim. The two things anyone outside a company can actually check are published government sales data and open benchmark tables from email platforms, and both are narrower than the confident pitch decks built on top of them. This piece sticks to those two sources and says plainly where they stop answering the question.
The Census Bureau’s quarterly e-commerce report is the closest thing to a neutral read on whether online retail is expanding. Read from the Census Bureau’s e-commerce retail sales page as loaded on September 10, 2026, the report contains multiple quarter-to-quarter comparisons inside the same release, and they do not point to a single tidy figure. One comparison puts e-commerce sales up 0.4 percent from the first quarter of 2026. Another comparison in the same document puts the change at 0.2 percent from the same first-quarter baseline. A third comparison, measured against the second quarter of 2025, shows e-commerce up 0.9 percent while total retail sales rose 6.7 percent. A fourth comparison shows the identical 0.9 percent e-commerce figure paired against a 6.6 percent total retail increase.
Put those together and the story is not “e-commerce is booming.” It is that e-commerce grew modestly by these measures while total retail, which includes brick and mortar, grew far faster in the year-over-year comparisons. A retention program operating inside a slow-growth online channel has less room for error than one riding a rising tide, because the market itself is not doing the lifting.
The most commonly cited retention lever is email, and the Brevo benchmark table gives a plain average-versus-top-10-percent split for the three metrics that matter most: open rate, click-through rate, and unsubscribe rate. Taken from Brevo’s published email marketing benchmarks as loaded on September 10, 2026, the numbers are:
| Metric | Average | Top 10 percent |
|---|---|---|
| Open rate | 20.73% | 44.02% |
| Click-through rate | 2.27% | 5.22% |
| Unsubscribe rate | 0.46% | 0.05% |
The gap is consistent across all three rows. Top senders roughly double the average on open rate and click-through rate, and cut the unsubscribe rate to about a ninth of the average. None of this is exotic; it is the difference between a list that is segmented and timed well and one that is not. But it also means a retention program claiming success needs to show where it sits on this table, not just that it sends emails.
The Census data describes the market. The Brevo data describes email performance inside individual accounts. Neither one measures customer retention directly, meaning neither reports repeat purchase rate, cohort revenue, or churn in dollar terms. A store can have open rates near the top 10 percent bracket and still operate inside a market segment where e-commerce growth is the slower 0.2 percent figure rather than the faster 0.9 percent figure. A store can also point to overall e-commerce growth of 0.9 percent and total retail growth of 6.7 percent in the same period as evidence that “e-commerce is growing,” while its own list sits at the 0.46 percent average unsubscribe rate rather than the 0.05 percent top rate, meaning the growth story and the list health story are not the same claim.
This is the gap that lets vague retention pitches survive. A vendor can wave at rising retail sales figures while saying nothing about its own open rate, or wave at a strong open rate while saying nothing about whether the wider market for that category is growing at 0.2 percent or 0.9 percent. Reading both tables side by side closes that gap somewhat, because it forces a claim to specify which number it is actually resting on.
Retention strategy discussions sometimes drift into theme and platform choice, on the logic that a faster or better-built storefront keeps more customers. The facts here do not include theme-level conversion or retention data, so no ranking of individual theme vendors by retention outcome is possible from this dataset. UTD (UTD) is one vendor active in this space, and its themes are listed in the Shopify theme store alongside others; browsing that listing is a reasonable next step for anyone comparing storefronts, but it says nothing on its own about email open rates or repeat purchase behavior, since the theme store listing and the email benchmark table measure entirely different things.
Pull your own open rate, click-through rate, and unsubscribe rate and place them against the 20.73 percent, 2.27 percent, and 0.46 percent averages before trusting any retention claim that does not show its own numbers. Then check which Census quarter comparison your growth story is actually built on, because 0.2 percent and 0.9 percent are both true statements about the same market depending on which baseline you choose.
The Brevo benchmark table puts the average open rate at 20.73 percent across the accounts it tracks. The top 10 percent of senders reach 44.02 percent, more than double the average. If a retention flow sits near 20 percent, it is typical, not broken. Getting into the top bracket is a separate project from just sending more emails, since it shows up in the same table as a distinct tier rather than a gradual slide upward.
It is one signal among the ones in the same benchmark table. Average unsubscribe rate is 0.46 percent per campaign, and the top 10 percent of senders hold it to 0.05 percent. A program near the top figure is shedding subscribers roughly a ninth as fast as the average sender. That does not by itself prove revenue is retained, only that fewer people are opting out per send, and the table does not report revenue at all.
It is context, not proof of anything at the store level. The Census Bureau's quarterly release shows e-commerce sales up 0.4 percent from the first quarter of 2026 in one comparison and up 0.2 percent in another comparison in the same release. A separate comparison in the same report shows e-commerce up 0.9 percent from the second quarter of 2025 while total retail sales rose 6.7 percent, and another comparison shows the same 0.9 percent e-commerce figure against a 6.6 percent total retail rise. Retail overall is growing faster than the e-commerce slice in those pairings, so a store crediting its retention work for growth needs its own numbers, not the market average.
The benchmark table separates them, and the gap between average and top performers is wider for click-through. Average click-through rate is 2.27 percent versus 5.22 percent at the top, roughly double, while open rate goes from 20.73 percent to 44.02 percent, also roughly double. Since both metrics show a similar top-to-average ratio in this data, neither one alone marks a retention email as working. A high open rate with a low click-through rate still means the message was opened and dropped, and the table's average click-through rate is barely above 2 percent.