If you are using Klaviyo for your email marketing program, you will know that Klaviyo gives you a lot of data. It is normal to log into your account and feel slightly overwhelmed by the number of charts, metrics, and reporting tabs available. Know that you are not alone. The Klaviyo Email Marketing dashboard is comprehensive. This deep level of data and insights is one of Klaviyo’s biggest strengths, but it can also make it hard to know where to focus.
The truth is that you do not need to track everything. You need to track the right things that matter for your business, understand what they are telling you, and use that information to make better and more informed marketing decisions.
If you are unsure on what metrics to focus on, you are in the right place. This article walks you through the email marketing metrics that actually matter in Klaviyo, what they mean in practice, and how to use them to improve your email marketing program over time.
Email-Attributed Revenue
This is the most important number in your Klaviyo account. Email-attributed revenue shows you how much money your e-commerce store earned as a direct result of someone clicking on an email and making a purchase within a defined attribution window (usually five days by default, adjustable in your settings).
The email-attributed revenue number gives you the clearest picture of what your email program is actually contributing to your overall business. It is the metric you should be able to cite in any conversation about the value of email marketing, and it is the one that should always be the anchor in your reporting.
In Klaviyo, you can see email-attributed revenue broken down by flow and by campaign. This breakdown is powerful because it shows you not just how much total revenue email is generating, but which specific automations and sends are doing the most work. A flow that generates $3,000 a month on autopilot is worth very different attention than a campaign that took three hours to build and generated $300.
Revenue Per Recipient (RPR)
Revenue per recipient (RPR) is email-attributed revenue divided by the number of emails delivered. It normalizes revenue across sends of different sizes, which makes it a useful metric for comparing the performance of different campaigns or flows without being misled by audience size.
For example, a campaign sent to 10,000 subscribers that generates $2,000 has an RPR of $0.20. A campaign sent to 2,000 subscribers that generates $1,000 has an RPR of $0.50. On the surface, the first campaign generated more revenue, but the second performed significantly better relative to audience size. RPR tells you which emails are doing more work per person.
Tracking RPR over time gives you a useful benchmark for your program. If your RPR is trending down even as your list grows, it is a signal that engagement quality is declining or that your email marketing content is becoming less relevant to your audience.
Open Rate
Open rate measures the percentage of delivered emails that were opened. It is the most commonly cited email metric and one of the most useful for understanding how your subject lines and sending reputation are performing.
An important context note: since Apple introduced Mail Privacy Protection in 2021, open rates have become less reliable as a precise metric because Apple Mail pre-loads email content for some users, which registers as an open regardless of whether the email was actually read. This means open rates for lists with many Apple Mail users are often overstated.
Despite this, open rate is still a valuable directional metric. A significant drop in open rate is a signal worth investigating, even if the absolute number is not perfectly accurate. And when you are A/B testing subject lines, comparing open rate between variants on the same send eliminates the Apple Mail distortion because both variants are affected equally.
For most e-commerce brands, an open rate between 30 and 45 percent is a healthy range for campaigns. Flows, especially welcome and abandoned cart emails, often see higher open rates because they go to people in a high-engagement moment.
Click Rate and Click-to-Open Rate
Click rate measures the percentage of delivered emails where a subscriber clicked at least one link. Click-to-open rate (CTOR) measures clicks as a percentage of opens.
Click rate tells you how compelling your emails are at driving action across your full audience. CTOR tells you how effective your email content is at converting people who actually opened it.
These two metrics together give you a more complete picture than either one alone. A high open rate with a low CTOR means your subject lines are working but your email content or offer is not landing. A low open rate with a high CTOR means the problem is getting people to open, not getting them to click once they do. Understanding which part of the funnel has friction helps you focus your optimization in the right place.
For campaign emails, a click rate of one to two percent is a common benchmark, though this varies significantly by industry and offer type. Promotional emails with strong offers tend to see higher click rates than educational content. Flows, especially cart abandonment, often see click rates well above five percent.
Conversion Rate and Revenue
Conversion rate in Klaviyo refers to the percentage of email recipients who made a purchase within the attribution window. This is distinct from click rate, because not every click results in a purchase.
Revenue is the dollar outcome of those conversions. Tracking conversion rate alongside revenue gives you a complete picture of what happens after someone clicks: not just that they visited, but whether they actually bought.
These metrics are most meaningful at the flow level, where you can compare performance across different automations. An abandoned cart flow with a high click rate but a low conversion rate might indicate that subscribers are returning to the site but encountering friction at checkout. A post-purchase flow with steady conversions confirms that your cross-sell strategy is working.
Unsubscribe Rate
Unsubscribe rate is the percentage of recipients who opted out of your list after a given send. A healthy unsubscribe rate is typically 0.1 to 0.2 percent per send. Consistent rates above 0.5 percent are a warning sign that something about your content, your frequency, or that your list health needs attention.
Unsubscribes are not inherently bad. Every list has people on it who were never going to buy and have been hanging around since an old opt-in they forgot about. When those people unsubscribe, it is a natural cleanup of your list that improves your overall deliverability and engagement metrics.
What you want to watch for is a sudden spike in unsubscribes tied to a specific send or a trend of rising unsubscribes over several months. A spike often means a specific email missed the mark with your audience. A trend suggests a more systemic issue with relevance, frequency, or list quality.
Spam Complaint Rate
Your spam complaint rate is one of the most consequential metrics in your Klaviyo account, and it is the one most brands pay the least attention to.
A spam complaint happens when an email subscriber clicks “Mark As Spam” instead of unsubscribing. Inbox providers like Gmail and Yahoo monitor this rate closely. If your spam complaint rate consistently exceeds 0.08 percent, you are at risk of having your emails filtered to the spam folder or blocked entirely.
Klaviyo shows you spam complaint data in your account overview. If you see a rate above 0.05 percent on any send, investigate immediately. Common causes include sending to old or purchased lists (a big no no), emailing people who did not explicitly opt in, sending too frequently, or emailing contacts who have not engaged in a long time.
Flow Performance Overview
Beyond individual campaign metrics, Klaviyo’s flow reporting gives you a high-level view of how your automations are performing over time. You can see revenue generated, emails sent, open rate, click rate, and conversion rate for each flow, and you can drill down into individual flow actions to see how specific emails within a sequence are performing.
Reviewing your flow performance monthly is a habit worth building. Flows that have not been reviewed or updated in over a year are almost certainly underperforming relative to what they could be doing with fresh copy, updated product recommendations, and refined timing.
Building a Simple Email Marketing Reporting Habit
You do not need to check every metric every day. What you do need is a consistent review of your email program’s most important numbers. We recommend reviewing these numbers weekly, but your cadence will largely depend on how advanced your email program is. At minimum, these numbers should be reviewed monthly.
Once a month at minimum, review the following:
- Email-attributed revenue and what percentage of store revenue it represents
- Average open rate
- Click rate
- Unsubscribe and spam complaint rates
- Top-performing flows by revenue generated
That review, done consistently, gives you the visibility to make good decisions about where to invest your attention next.
The brands that build strong email marketing programs are not the ones tracking 50 metrics. They are the ones tracking the right five, understanding what those numbers are telling them, and using that understanding to improve continuously.
If you want help interpreting your Klaviyo data or building a reporting process that gives you clear visibility into what is working, we are happy to walk through it with you.
Continue reading: Email marketing ROI: What e-commerce brands can realistically expect and How to A/B test emails in Klaviyo (and what to test first).