Open rate tells you your subject line worked. It tells you nothing about whether the email itself made anyone money. That’s what revenue per recipient, or RPR, is for, and it’s the one number in Klaviyo most people never check.
What is it actually measuring?
RPR is total revenue attributed to a campaign or flow, divided by the number of people who received it. Klaviyo calculates it automatically, under Analytics for any campaign, or under Flows for any automated sequence.
Here’s why it beats open rate as a signal. A campaign can pull a 45 percent open rate and still lose money if nobody who opens it buys anything. A campaign with a mediocre 18 percent open rate can be your best send of the month if the people who do open it convert well. Open rate measures curiosity. RPR measures whether the email was worth sending at all.
What’s a healthy number?
This shifts a lot by price point and vertical, so treat any single benchmark with some suspicion. As a rough range for DTC brands: flows (welcome, abandoned cart, post-purchase) typically land between $0.50 and $2.50+ per recipient, since they’re triggered by real intent. Campaigns, going to your broader, less-primed list, usually run lower, often $0.05 to $0.35.
If your flows are sitting below $0.50, that’s rarely a copywriting problem. More often it’s a targeting issue, the flow firing on the wrong trigger, or a timing issue, arriving too late to catch real intent.
Where does this go wrong?
Most people check RPR once, see a number, and move on without tracking it. RPR only tells you something useful as a trend. Pull it monthly for your core flows and watch the direction, not just where it sits today. A slowly declining RPR on your welcome flow, month over month, is one of the earliest reliable signs something in your list, offer, or sequencing has broken, usually well before it shows up anywhere else.
Open Klaviyo, go to Flows, pick any flow, and check the Overview tab. RPR sits right next to open rate and click rate. Most eyes skip straight past it to the more familiar numbers. Start looking there instead.
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