You’ve probably heard that email marketing delivers some of the highest ROI of any digital channel. According to Litmus’ State of Email Report, 30% of companies see $36–$50 returned for every $1 spent on email, and for retail and e-commerce brands specifically, that figure climbs to 45:1. Those numbers are real, but they tell an incomplete story.
That average includes brands with fully optimized email programs and brands that send one campaign a month to an uncleaned list. It includes businesses with sophisticated automation running in the background 24/7 and businesses that haven’t touched their welcome email since they set it up three years ago. The range of actual performance is enormous, and knowing where your store should fall, and why, is far more useful than a headline statistic.
This article breaks down the metrics that actually matter, what percentage of your overall revenue should be coming from email, and how that revenue should be split between your campaigns and your flows.
The Metrics That Actually Matter
Most businesses track open rates and click rates because they’re the numbers email platforms put front and center. They matter, but they’re leading indicators, they tell you how your emails are performing, not what they’re contributing to your business. For e-commerce brands, the metrics worth obsessing over are further down the funnel.
Email Attributed Revenue is the most important number in your program. This is the total revenue your store generated as a direct result of someone clicking an email. On Klaviyo, this is tracked automatically and displayed at the account, flow, and campaign level. This is your north star, everything else in your email program should be evaluated in service of moving this number up.
Email’s percentage of total revenue puts that attributed revenue in context. If your store did $500,000 last year and $120,000 of that came from email, your email program accounts for 24% of total revenue. This is the benchmark that tells you whether email is pulling its weight as a channel. As a general benchmark, we advise our clients to aim for 30% of revenue to come from email.
Revenue per recipient (RPR) measures how much revenue, on average, each email you send generates per person it reaches. This is useful for comparing the efficiency of different campaigns and flows without being misled by list size. A campaign that goes to 5,000 people and generates $1,500 has an RPR of $0.30, which is strong. One that goes to 10,000 and generates $400 has an RPR of $0.04, which signals a targeting or relevance problem.
Flow Revenue vs. Campaign Revenue Split tells you whether your email program is balanced and sustainable. More on this below.
List growth rate matters because a stagnant or shrinking list eventually limits your program’s ceiling. A healthy email program is growing its list consistently through on-site opt-in forms, lead magnets, and post-purchase capture.
Open Rate and Click-to-Open Rate (CTOR) are still worth monitoring — especially CTOR, which measures clicks as a percentage of opens rather than total sends. A high open rate with a low CTOR means your subject lines are strong but your email content or offers aren’t compelling enough to drive action.
What Percentage of Revenue Should Email Marketing Drive?
The honest answer is: it depends on where your program is and how seriously you’re investing in it. But here are realistic benchmarks to give you a sense of where you should be aiming.
Early-stage programs (just getting started, basic flows in place): In this early stage, email typically accounts for 10-20% of total store revenue. At this stage, the priority is building the right foundation: a working welcome series, a basic abandoned cart flow, and a clean list. Results are real but modest until more is layered in.
Developing programs (core flows running, campaigns sent regularly): We aim for a benchmark of 30% attributed revenue to come from email, but 20–35% is a reasonable and achievable target. With a welcome series, abandoned cart, and post-purchase flow in place, plus consistent campaign sends to segmented audiences, email starts compounding. This is where most mid-stage e-commerce brands should be operating.
Mature, optimized programs (full flow stack, strong segmentation, regular A/B testing): 35–50% of total revenue from email is achievable for brands that treat it as a primary channel. This level requires more than just having flows turned on. It means actively managing list health, testing and iterating, and sending campaigns that are genuinely relevant to the audience receiving them.
If your store is generating less than 15% of revenue from email marketing and your list is reasonably sized, that’s almost always a sign of a structural problem. This could be missing flows, poor list hygiene, no segmentation, or infrequent sends.
Email Flows vs. Campaigns: How Revenue Should Split
This is one of the most underappreciated benchmarks in e-commerce email marketing, and one of the clearest indicators of whether a program is built on a solid foundation or held together with one-time sends.
Flows should account for 50–70% of your total email revenue. Flows are automated sequences that trigger based on customer behavior, and because they reach people at high-intent moments (right after subscribing, right after abandoning a cart, right after making a purchase), they convert at significantly higher rates than broadcast campaigns. A well-built flow stack generates revenue every single day without requiring ongoing effort.
The most impactful flows for most e-commerce stores, roughly in order of revenue contribution, are abandoned cart, welcome series, post-purchase, browse abandonment, and win-back. If these five are running and optimized, they will form the backbone of your email revenue.
Campaigns should account for 30–50% of your total email revenue. Campaigns are the one-time sends such as product launches, seasonal promotions, flash sales, editorial newsletters. They’re time-sensitive and require active planning and consistency, but they’re also highly scalable: a well-crafted campaign to a well-segmented list can generate significant revenue in a single send.
The risk of over-relying on campaigns is that your email revenue becomes inconsistent and effortful. If flows aren’t running, every dollar from email requires someone to sit down and write and send something. That’s not a sustainable program: it’s a treadmill.
A healthy split looks like this: flows running reliably in the background driving the majority of email revenue, with campaigns layered on top consistently (a minimum of once per week) to capture seasonal moments and keep your brand present. Neither replaces the other, and together they create a program that’s both consistent and responsive.
Takeaways: What to Do with This Information
If your email revenue percentage is lower than it should be, or your flow-to-campaign split is inverted, you don’t need to rebuild everything at once. Start with the highest-impact fix: if flows aren’t running, that’s the first priority. If flows are running but haven’t been reviewed or updated in over a year, an audit will almost certainly surface quick wins.
Email Marketing ROI doesn’t happen automatically, but it does compound. The brands seeing 40%+ of their revenue from email didn’t get there overnight. They built the right foundation, iterated consistently, and treated email as the serious revenue channel it is.
If you’d like to know where your program stands and what it would take to close the gap, we’re happy to take a look.
Continue reading: The 6 Klaviyo flows every e-commerce store needs