A store email scorecard is not a solo ad price

Answer The July 2026 scorecard from BS&Co is their portfolio of store email, not a solo ad price. On August 3, 2026 they reported 12 e-commerce brands, 5.63 million emails, and $646,294 in email-attributed revenue, down 13.0 percent from June. Use it to see how owned mail behaves. Do not paste it onto a rented send.

The note that started this: Email Marketing Benchmarks: July 2026, BS&Co Team, August 3, 2026.

A buyer hunting solo ad pricing will meet a seller who waves an open rate as if it were a market. The number usually comes from a different business. Store mail goes to people who bought, browsed, or joined that store. A solo ad goes to a list that joined the seller. The click you rent is a guest appearance. The scorecard below is not that guest.

BS&Co Team published the July edition on August 3, 2026. The headline they chose is a ratio they call the flow multiplier, flow revenue per recipient divided by campaign revenue per recipient. It compressed from 25.9x to 12.4x, which they call the sharpest one-month move in the series. Campaign revenue held flat on 20 percent fewer sends. Flow revenue fell 27 percent. Both moves pulled the ratio the same direction. They also say Apple's Mail Privacy Protection inflates the open rates, so the opens are a noisy health signal and the useful story is downstream.

What did the July 2026 store-email scorecard actually measure?

BS&Co reported their own portfolio: 12 e-commerce brands, 5.63 million emails, and $646,294 in email-attributed revenue, down 13.0 percent from June. It is their store mail, not the solo ad market.

Read the frame before the percentages. Twelve brands they manage. Seven verticals. Revenue that Klaviyo attributed to email, not the whole store. They restated June against the same twelve continuing brands, so the comparison is inside their roster. One brand leaving the set would have changed the totals. This is a managed book of store programs. It is not a census of inboxes, and it is not a census of solo ads.

Their scorecard, which they print as the portfolio aggregate, puts the open rate at 43.81 percent, the campaign open rate at 44.04 percent, and the flow open rate at 39.56 percent. Spam complaints sit at 0.009 percent for the portfolio, 0.007 percent on campaigns, and 0.039 percent on flows. Those complaint rates are theirs. A solo ad seller who quotes a similar open rate without a complaint rate is offering the flattering half.

• The sample is 12 stores, named as their portfolio.
• The revenue is email-attributed, on their attribution window.
• The opens are inflated by privacy proxies, which they say themselves.
• Nothing in the table is a click you can buy from a stranger's list.

How did campaign mail and flow mail differ in that portfolio?

They said campaign revenue held flat on 20 percent fewer sends while flow revenue fell 27 percent, and the flow multiplier compressed from 25.9x to 12.4x. Flows clicked harder than campaigns in their scorecard.

The click line is the one a solo ad buyer should stare at. Campaign clicks were 0.66 percent. Flow clicks were 2.52 percent. A flow, in their world, is mail to someone who already did something: a browse, a cart, a purchase, a welcome. A campaign is the broadcast. The people who already raised a hand clicked more. That is ordinary. It is also the opposite of a cold rented send, where the reader raised a hand for the seller's usual letter, not for your offer.

Smaller campaign sends holding the same revenue is their efficiency story for July. It is not permission to buy a smaller solo ad and expect the same dollars. Their readers already know the store. Your readers, on a solo ad, know the seller. If the offer is a stranger in that letter, the complaint risk sits on the seller's domain, which is the asset you are renting for an hour.

Can a buyer use those open rates to price a solo ad?

No. Their campaign open rate was 44.04 percent and their flow open rate was 39.56 percent, on mail to people who already had a relationship with those stores. A rented solo ad is a different list and a different job.

Price the quote you can audit: who sends, which niche, which mailboxes, what the from-name is, where the disclosure sits, what proof follows, and what refund applies if the send slips. An open rate from a store portfolio does not fill any of those blanks. A seller who borrows 44 percent as a promise is borrowing someone else's customers.

If you sell sends, do not decorate the order with this table. Your list is not their twelve brands. Say what your last comparable send did, to which inbox mix, and show the complaint line next to the open line. The pages on best solo ad vendors are about that written quote. A scorecard from Portland is a useful look at owned mail. It is not your rate card.