Most ecommerce marketers measure email success by the following benchmark metrics: open rates, click-through rates, and total revenue attributed to email (and sms) programs. Those metrics matter, but they obscure a structural question that determines whether or not your email marketing program is built for sustainable growth or stuck on a treadmill: how is your attributed revenue distributed between automated flows and regular email campaigns?
The benchmark we hold our Klaviyo clients toward is roughly 30% of email revenue should be coming from flows and 70% should be coming from campaigns. If your numbers skew heavily toward campaigns, your program is over-reliant on send volume. Every dollar requires a new email. Flows, by contrast, are automated and work while you sleep. Welcome series, abandoned cart, browse abandonment, post-purchase, and win-back sequences capture intent at the exact moment it surfaces, which is why they consistently outperform campaigns on revenue per recipient.
We recently audited a CPG specialty retailer’s Klaviyo account and found email contributing 27% of total revenue. This is respectable on paper, but it was coming almost entirely from campaigns. The brand was leaving compounding revenue on the table because its flows hadn’t been touched in over a year. The fix for this isn’t glamorous. It requires a methodical pass through each automation, tightening triggers, layering segmentation, and testing offer logic. Done well, it lifts email’s overall revenue contribution into the 30 to 40% range without sending a single additional email campaign.
The second structural issue we see, and it almost always travels with the first, is a bloated email list of unengaged subscribers. There is an optics issue here. Clients think they need to keep these email list because of volume. But in fact, the opposite is true. A brand we worked with carried more than 60,000 contacts who had never engaged with a single email. As tempting as it may be to send to that audience, we do not recommend it. Sending to that audience does two things, and they are both bad. First, it drags down deliverability metrics that inbox providers use to decide whether your future emails reach the inbox at all. The second is it inflates list size in a way that distorts every per-recipient metric you report on.
So, what do you do with these unengaged subscribers? The solution is a deliberate sunset flow. Identify contacts who haven’t opened or clicked on an email in 180 days, run them through a final re-engagement sequence with a meaningful incentive, and suppress the non-responders. Brands often resist this step because it shrinks their list size. But a smaller list of engaged subscribers will out-earn a bloated list of ghost email subscribers every quarter, and your sender reputation will thank you.
For B2B and DTC brands evaluating their own programs, three diagnostic questions cut through the noise. What percentage of email revenue comes from flows versus campaigns? When was each core flow last optimized? What share of your active list has engaged in the past six months? Honest answers usually point to the same conclusion: your email program it’s broken, it just hasn’t reached its full potential.
Klaviyo and similar platforms hand you the infrastructure. The work is in using it deliberately, treating flows as a portfolio of revenue-generating assets rather than a one-time setup, and treating list hygiene as a discipline rather than an afterthought. Done together, those two shifts often produce the single largest revenue lift available without raising ad spend or chasing a new channel. They also create the foundation other channels rely on. Paid social performs better when retargeting audiences are clean, and loyalty programs convert better when they sit on top of a well-segmented list. Start with email architecture, and the rest of the stack gets easier.
Would you like to learn more about how LTM Digital can help you reach your full email potential? Contact us for a free discovery call. LTM Digital is a Klaviyo Agency Partner and we would love to chat with you.