If you have ever wondered why your inbox fills with serum reminders at oddly perfect moments, new data has an answer. According to BeautyMatter, beauty brands' email open rates climbed from 24% to a high of 31% between January 2025 and July 2026, yet the share of clickers who actually buy fell from roughly 20% to about 12%. The gap between those two numbers is the whole story: getting opened is easy now, and getting bought is not.
The practical takeaway for shoppers is that the messages you act on are increasingly not one-off blasts. They are automation — pre-built journeys triggered by what you do, like leaving a cart or running low on a favorite. And the data backs that up: automated flows held their conversion rates steady across six quarters while regular campaigns slid.
One caveat before the numbers go further. This dataset comes from Omnisend, an email and SMS platform used by more than 150,000 brands, which reports an average of $79 back for every $1 spent on its own tool. A platform reporting on its own customers is the attributed source of its own metrics, not an independent referee. Read the figures as a picture of one platform's beauty brands, not the whole industry.
Why are opens up but purchases down?
Because opening and buying measure different things. Omnisend's six quarters of beauty-specific data, reported by BeautyMatter, show open rates rising steadily while click-to-open rates barely moved, holding between roughly 1.7% and 2.1%. Subject lines are working. The click that follows is not converting like it used to.
On standalone campaigns — the scheduled newsletters and promo blasts — click-to-conversion slid from close to 20% in early 2025 to around 12% in the most recent quarter. The likely reading, which the reporting itself supports, is that campaigns reach a broad audience: people who open out of curiosity, browse a launch, or read a guide without any intent to buy. More volume in more inboxes means each send is judged against more competition for the same attention.
Automated messages sit at the other end of the funnel. An abandoned-cart email arrives after you have already picked a product. A welcome flow lands after you signed up. By the time those messages fire, the customer is closer to buying, so higher conversion is almost built in. Abandoned cart automation held click-to-conversion between 40% and 50% across all six quarters, even trending upward. Welcome flows dipped mid-period and closed almost where they started, at 54% in early 2025 and 55% most recently.
What does this mean for the emails you actually get?
Expect fewer generic blasts and more messages tied to predictable moments. Beauty is unusually well suited to this, because the next purchase often has a built-in clock: the serum is running low, the shade restocked, the birthday earned a loyalty perk. Diana Ramanauskaite, Director of Customer Success at Omnisend, told BeautyMatter that beauty brands are looking to turn one-time purchases into long-term relationships, and that they get the most value from automation and segmentation because timing and relevance drive repeat purchases. For related coverage, see Hair Oil vs Hair Serum: What Each One Actually Does.
"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, according to the report. In plain terms: the brand is watching what you look at, and the follow-up email is written by a workflow, not a person.
Gintarė Pasaulytė-Paukštė, who manages Omnisend's account experts team for EMEA and APAC, framed the benefit for small brands. Welcome journeys, replenishment reminders, birthday flows and VIP programs all run on automation, she said, freeing founders and solo marketers to focus on content and product instead. Her view, per the report, is that the biggest problem this solves is turning one-time buyers into repeat customers through touchpoints that would be nearly impossible to run by hand at scale.
Is SMS the next crowded channel?
It is heading that way. Standalone SMS campaign conversion for beauty brands dropped from 0.29% in early 2025 to 0.18% by the second quarter of 2026, with click-to-conversion falling more sharply over the same stretch. Automated SMS flows, meanwhile, held a steady 0.78% conversion rate on average — well above what one-off texts are pulling in.
The math is simple. More brands are texting than ever, and volume spikes hard around high-traffic periods like Black Friday. When more messages compete for the same attention, per-message performance drops even as the channel grows. Beauty brands still perform well relative to other industries on the platform, despite the dip. For shoppers, the practical effect is that the bar for a text worth reading keeps rising — which is a good argument for unsubscribing from any list that texts you anything but a real reminder or a real offer.
How does this look inside a real brand?
Vani-T, an Australian "clean" beauty brand sold in salons worldwide as well as direct to consumers, offers a documented example. The brand's Omnisend account is run by Megan Ulstrup, a graphic designer who also handles the brand's campaigns, automations and segmentation — one person, doing the work that used to take a marketing team.
Her method, as reported: campaigns are planned from a marketing calendar six or more weeks ahead, spaced out by objective rather than just by date. Sales, education, nurturing and broader campaign support each get their own slot. That spacing is the quiet discipline behind the data — timing beats volume, a theme the reporting returns to again and again.
What should a shopper take from all this?
Two things. First, the messages most likely to be worth your click are the triggered ones — the restock alert, the replenishment nudge, the abandoned-cart note — because brands now know broad blasts convert poorly. Second, your attention is the scarce resource in this equation, and both sides of the inbox know it. The brands winning are not sending more. They are sending better-timed, more personal messages, and the six quarters of data suggest that is not a fad but a structural shift in how beauty sells.
For readers building a routine rather than a brand, none of this changes what goes on your shelf — that logic lives in things like choosing a drugstore moisturizer that actually does the work. But it does explain the inbox. When the right reminder arrives at the right moment, that is automation doing its job. When it is noise, unsubscribe without guilt. This connects to our earlier piece, The Drugstore Moisturizer Ingredients That Actually Do the Work.