When is the right moment to land in a customer's inbox, and when does one more email just become noise? Omnisend, the email and SMS marketing platform used by more than 150,000 brands that see an average of $79 back for every $1 spent, pulled six quarters of beauty-specific data to answer that question. What it found isn't as simple as "email is dead" or "email is booming." Opens are up. Converting on the click is the harder part now.
January 2025 through July 2026, beauty brands on Omnisend saw their open rates climb steadily, from 24% up to a high of 31%, before settling around 28% most recently. That's a sizable jump, suggesting beauty subject lines are doing their job.
Click-to-open rates barely moved over the same stretch, holding in a tight band between roughly 1.7% and 2.1%. But click-to-conversion on standalone campaigns, meaning how often someone who clicks actually buys, slid from close to 20% in early 2025 to around 12% in the most recently measured quarter.
Automated flows didn't follow the same pattern. Abandoned cart automation held its click-to-conversion in the 40% to 50% range across all six quarters, even trending upward. Welcome flow dipped in the middle of the period but closed almost exactly where it started, at 54% in early 2025 and 55% by the most recent quarter. Where standalone campaigns lost ground, automation largely held steady.
That comparison only goes so far, though. Campaigns often reach a much broader audience. Someone might open an email about a launch, read a product guide, or click through simply because something caught their eye. Automated messages tend to come later, after a customer has already signed up, browsed, bought something, or left a cart behind.
So the higher conversion rates on automation aren't especially surprising. The customer is usually closer to buying by the time that message arrives. Campaigns still play an important part in getting people interested and bringing them back, while automation helps pick up from there.
In addition to automation, that’s where segmentation comes in, according to Diana Ramanauskaite, Director of Customer Success at Omnisend. Ramanauskaite often sees that beauty brands are looking for ways to turn one-time purchases into long-term customer relationships. "Omnisend works especially well for them because they can easily build journeys around replenishment, product launches, and personalized recommendations based on what customers actually browse and buy,” Ramanauskaite said. She added that beauty brands tend to get the most value from automation and segmentation because timing and relevance are key to driving repeat purchases.
The SMS side of the data tells a related story. Conversion rates on standalone SMS campaigns for beauty brands dropped from 0.29% in early 2025 to 0.18% by the second quarter of 2026, and click-to-conversion fell more sharply over the same period. Automated SMS flows tell a different story: They've held a steady 0.78% conversion rate on average over that same stretch, well above what one-off campaigns are pulling in.
Part of that comes down to simple math. More brands are using SMS than ever, and sending volume tends to spike hard around high-traffic periods like Black Friday. When more messages compete for the same amount of attention, per-message performance naturally declines even as the channel as a whole continues to grow. Beauty brands are still performing well relative to other industries on the platform, despite that dip.
For brands newer to SMS, or scaling it up quickly, that's worth keeping in mind. Growth in volume doesn't automatically mean a loss in strategy. It just means the bar for a well-timed, well-targeted message keeps getting higher.
One theme that comes up again and again in this data: Timing beats volume. That's echoed by Gintarė Pasaulytė-Paukštė, Manager of the Account Experts Team for EMEA and APAC at Omnisend, who works directly with beauty brands on the platform.
Beauty brands use Omnisend to run personalized, relationship-driven email marketing without needing a large team, Pasaulytė-Paukštė said. Welcome journeys, replenishment reminders, birthday flows, and VIP loyalty programs all run on automation, freeing up founders and solo marketers to focus on content and product instead. The brand's Shopify-native integration, AI product recommender, and built-in lifestyle stage map work together to get the right message to the right customer "from day one," she said. In her view, the biggest problem Omnisend solves for beauty brands is turning one-time buyers into repeat customers through automated touchpoints that would be nearly impossible to pull off manually at scale.
For a category like beauty, where a customer's next purchase is often tied to something predictable (they're running low on serum, their favorite shade just restocked, their birthday's coming up and they've earned a loyalty perk), that kind of automated, behavior-based timing is doing a lot of the heavy lifting, the data shows.
Vani-T, an Australian “clean” beauty brand sold in salons worldwide as well as DTC, runs its Omnisend account through Megan Ulstrup, a graphic designer who also handles the brand's campaigns, automations, and segmentation. Her day-to-day offers a real-world look at how the trends in Omnisend's data play out.
Ulstrup plans campaigns from a marketing calendar six or more weeks ahead, spacing them out by objective rather than just by date, whether that's sales, education, nurturing or supporting a broader campaign, she said. She reuses formats already proven to perform well rather than starting from scratch every time. The automated flows, by contrast, live directly in Omnisend. "Once they're set up and tested, I can largely set and forget them, which is one of my favorite parts of automation," she said.
Vani-T's approach gets specific when it comes to segmentation. The brand runs separate Omnisend accounts for its B2B (salon) and DTC customers, and even within DTC, most campaigns don't go to the full list. "We typically send two campaigns a week, but only one would usually go to our entire database," Ulstrup said. "The rest are targeted to specific segments to keep content relevant and maintain strong deliverability and engagement." New customers get more education and brand introduction, while returning customers see loyalty offers, referrals, and bundles, an approach Ulstrup credits with keeping VANI-T's open rates well above industry benchmarks.
That segmentation strategy lines up with what the broader data shows: Opens are relatively easy to win, but converting on the click takes more than a generic push. Ulstrup has seen the same thing play out on her end over the past year. "The biggest change has been recognizing that more emails don't necessarily mean better results; relevance matters more," she said. She's leaned harder into educational content, myths, how-tos, product explainers, and has been surprised by how well they perform compared to straightforward sales emails. With open rates already strong, her focus now is on improving clicks and conversions. "We're using curiosity and education to give customers a reason to explore the product, rather than simply pushing a sale," she said.
None of this suggests brands should send less, or send more; it suggests they should send smarter. Rising open rates mean people are still willing to give a beauty brand's inbox presence a chance. What happens after that first click—whether it's a generic promo or a message that actually reflects what someone's browsed, bought, or is due to run out of—appears to make the real difference. It's a pattern VANI-T is already implementing:more relevance, more segmentation, and less reliance on volume alone.
For beauty brands weighing where to put their energy this year, the data points less toward chasing bigger lists or louder campaigns and more toward getting the timing right on the messages already going out. For brands considering a platform switch, that calculation includes cost and setup time. Migration is free on Omnisend and takes up to five days, with pricing up to 35% lower than Klaviyo's for comparable features.
