Sweat Pants Agency Research
Original research from 4,000+ DTC campaigns across 40+ accounts.
Counterintuitive findings on what actually moves retention revenue. Free to read. No gating on the data.
All 8 Reports
Browse the research
Each report is self-contained, around an 8-minute read, with the data + methodology + audit framework all in one place.
Subject Lines
The Email Subject Line Report
Across 4,000+ campaigns, the patterns that win opens are the opposite of the patterns that win clicks and revenue. The two clean rules.
+10.6pp
ALL-CAPS delta on click rate, but opposite signal on opens
Read the report →Welcome Flows
The Welcome Series Anatomy Report
Email #1 is the only welcome email worth A/B testing. The 9-element anatomy, the $25 vs $10 discount finding, and the founder voice paradox.
60-90%
of welcome revenue comes from Email #1
Read the report →Conversion Timing
The Email Conversion Window Report
The conversion window closes before most welcome series finish. The same pattern repeats for the second purchase at Day 90.
93.7%
of 30-day prospect conversions happen in days 0-7
Read the report →Unsubscribes
The Unsubscribe Calibration Report
The most counterintuitive finding in the series. Below 0.1% isn't list health — it's under-pushing. Brand-level and campaign-level data.
5.2x
RPR ratio: high-unsub vs low-unsub broadcasts
Read the report →Creative
The Email Creative Levers Report
The 11-lever leverboard from coding 52 winning and losing broadcast emails. Why length doesn't matter and density does.
+46pp
delta for strong action-verb CTAs
Read the report →Send Times
The Email Send Time Report
Most marketers send when they're at their desk. The data says the leverage is when most teams are not.
$0.250
peak email RPR at 3am ET — not business hours
Read the report →Benchmarks
The Email Marketing Benchmarks Report 2026
Full percentile distributions for open rate, click rate, unsubscribe, bounce, prospect conversion, and the repeat-purchase curve.
53.7%
median DTC email open rate
Read the report →Flow Performance
The Email Flow Performance Report
Where the money lives versus where the leverage is. The three under-built flows worth fixing first.
$1.50
Cart Abandonment RPS, but Back in Stock at $0.84 is 71% under-built
Read the report →Methodology
How the data was gathered
Every report in this series draws from the Sweat Pants Agency portfolio of 40+ active DTC and subscription brand accounts, trailing 12 months. We pulled 4,000+ broadcast campaign sends (filtered to sends of at least 1,000 recipients to remove noise), plus per-account flow performance, prospect cohort exports, and per-message welcome series breakdowns.
Within each report, we use within-brand quintile analysis to isolate patterns from brand-baseline variance. Top quintile and bottom quintile campaigns within each brand are coded, then aggregated portfolio-wide. Sample sizes per finding are documented in each report's methodology section.
We exclude pre-existing customer revenue from prospect funnel analyses, exclude Apple Mail Privacy Protection impact when reporting on click rate and revenue (open rate signals are explicitly flagged as MPP-inflated), and normalize flow taxonomy across Klaviyo, Postscript, and Attentive setups.
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