Open rates are a vanity metric. The only email marketing revenue per email metric Klaviyo users should track is revenue per email — the single number that tells you whether your email marketing system is actually generating business results or just generating opens. Open rates are not the metric that determines whether your email marketing system is working. Revenue per email is.
Why open rates mislead
Brand A sends to their full list of 10,000 subscribers. 38 percent open rate. They generate $2,000 in revenue. Revenue per email: $0.20. Brand B sends to a segment of 2,000 engaged subscribers. 61 percent open rate. They generate $1,800 in revenue. Revenue per email: $0.90. Brand A looks like the better email marketing system on every vanity metric. Brand B generates 4.5 times as much value per email sent.
The Apple Mail problem
Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection, which began rolling out in 2021, pre-loads email content for Apple Mail users regardless of whether they actually open the email. This means a significant and growing percentage of your reported opens are phantom opens — triggered by Apple’s servers, not by human eyes. Revenue per email bypasses this problem entirely because it measures what actually happened in your store, not what Apple’s servers reported.
The formula and benchmarks
Total revenue generated by a campaign divided by the number of emails sent.
- Below $0.05: Something fundamental is broken.
- $0.08 to $0.15: Average. Meaningful optimization opportunities exist.
- $0.20 to $0.35: Above average. Segmentation is working.
- $0.40 to $0.60: Strong.
- Above $0.60: Excellent.
The two levers that move it
Lever 1 is conversion rate — what percentage of recipients take the desired action. Better subject lines, copy, and offers all move this. Lever 2 is average order value — what each conversion is worth. Better product recommendations and smarter sequencing move this. Improving both levers multiplies rather than adds. Segmentation moves both levers simultaneously because better targeting improves both relevance (conversion rate) and specificity (AOV).
How to calculate it for your program
Pull your last five campaigns. For each, find attributed revenue in Klaviyo Analytics and divide by emails sent. Write down the result for each. Look at the variance. If one campaign is at $0.45 and three are at $0.08, ask what was different about the high performer. That answer is your optimization roadmap.
The Email Marketing Analytics Dashboard Kit gives you a ready-made tracking system for revenue per email and every other metric that matters — $27 at signifystudio.com/library.
Need more tools and frameworks? Browse everything at signifystudio.com/library.
Is Your Email Marketing System Actually Working?
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