- Revenue per recipient (RPR) = email revenue ÷ people who received the email. It puts a big blast and a small segment send on the same scale.
- Klaviyo's benchmarks report defines email revenue per recipient as total email-attributed revenue for a timeframe divided by the number of people who received an email.
- Across 4 consumable brands, welcome email #1 earned about $4.50 per person and replenishment flows about $2.23 per person.
- One fitness tech brand earned $0.19 per person from an engaged-segment send and $0.04 from a full-list blast.
What is revenue per recipient?
Revenue per recipient is how much money an email brought in for every person who received it.
The math is simple. Say a campaign goes to 20,000 people and Klaviyo credits it with $3,000. That's $3,000 ÷ 20,000 = $0.15 per recipient. (Made-up numbers, just to show how it works.)
Why bother dividing? Because total revenue rewards size. A blast to your whole list will almost always make more total dollars than a send to your best customers, even if it's a worse email. Revenue per recipient strips out list size so you can compare emails fairly.
How do you find revenue per recipient in Klaviyo?
There are two easy ways.
Use the benchmarks report. Klaviyo's help center describes an email revenue per recipient figure on the campaigns and flows pages of its benchmarks report. It defines it as your total revenue attributed to email for a given timeframe divided by the total number of people who received an email. That's good for an account-wide view and for seeing how you compare.
Calculate it per email. For any single campaign or flow email, take the attributed revenue and divide by the number of recipients. I do this in a spreadsheet: one row per email, columns for recipients, revenue and revenue per recipient. Then sort by that last column.
The second one is where the real answers are. An account-wide average hides the fact that one email might be doing most of the work.
One thing to know: Klaviyo's revenue is attributed revenue. Its help center says a conversion is tracked when someone opens or clicks and then buys within the attribution window, and that Apple Mail Privacy Protection auto-opens count by default. So revenue per recipient is still a reporting number, not a perfect measure of what the email caused. It's just a much better one than opens.
Why revenue per recipient beats open rate
Open rate tells you how many people your platform thinks opened the email. Revenue per recipient tells you how much money came from it.
Across 4 consumable brands and 2,897 campaigns, open rate tracked revenue at just 0.32. Click rate tracked it at 0.65. For one brand, more opens actually meant less money. And Apple's auto-opens pushed open rates past 85% on some segments. I wrote up the full comparison in open rate vs click rate.
So my order is: clicks tell me if people cared, and revenue per recipient tells me if it paid. Opens come last.
Revenue per recipient by email type: what our data shows
Here's what revenue per recipient looks like across different emails. The first five rows come from a pooled sample of 4 consumable brands. The last three are single-brand numbers, labeled.
| Revenue per recipient | What it tells you | |
|---|---|---|
| Welcome email #1 | about $4.50 | about 30x emails #2 to #5 |
| Welcome emails #2 to #5 | about $0.10 each | the rest of the welcome earns far less |
| Replenishment (reorder reminder) flow | about $2.23 | about 28x the best campaign |
| Cart abandonment email #5 | about $0.25 | same as email #3, so later emails still earn |
| Winback email #1 vs #3 | $0.11 vs $0.23 | the third email earned about 2x the first |
| Back-in-stock emails, a snack brand doing about $650K a month | $0.26 vs $0.15 brand average | about 1.7x its average |
| Engaged send vs full-list blast, a fitness tech brand | $0.19 vs $0.04 | targeting beat volume per person |
| Welcome email #1, a wellness brand (sleep) | about $43 per send | 50 deliveries in one month, so tiny sample |
That last row is real but small. It made $2,160 from 50 deliveries. Don't plan around $43. It just shows how much a great first welcome email can carry.
For the full set of numbers, see our CPG email marketing benchmarks.
What revenue per recipient tells you to do
Once you sort by revenue per recipient, the priorities get obvious.
- Put most of your welcome effort into email #1. At about $4.50 per person vs $0.10 for the rest, that's where the money is. Keep the welcome short.
- Build a reorder flow if your product runs out. At about $2.23 per person, it was one of the best earners in the sample, and only 2 of the 4 brands had one.
- Keep cart and winback long. Cart email #5 earned the same as #3. Winback #3 earned about twice what #1 did.
- Treat restocks as a big send. When something sells out, the restock email is your biggest send of the month.
- Send to engaged people. The fitness tech brand's engaged segment earned almost 5x as much per person as its full-list blast.
Where revenue per recipient can fool you
It's the best single number I know, but it's not perfect. A few things to watch:
- Tiny sends. An email to 50 people can post a huge number from one or two orders. Look at how many people received it before you get excited.
- Different kinds of emails. A welcome email reaches people at their most interested moment. A campaign to your whole list doesn't. Compare welcome to welcome and campaign to campaign.
- Sales and launches. A sitewide sale or a launch will spike it. That's real, but it's not your baseline.
- Broken tracking. Across my portfolio, about 20 sends showed opens and revenue but zero clicks. That meant click tracking was broken. If clicks are zero and revenue isn't, check tracking before you trust anything.
Where these numbers come from
The pooled numbers come from 4 consumable brands I work with, 2,897 campaigns and $17.7M in email revenue. It's a small sample, so treat them as directional. Single-brand numbers come from individual client accounts and are labeled with a descriptor instead of a name.
FAQ
What's a good revenue per recipient?
It depends on the email. In our 4-brand sample, welcome email #1 earned about $4.50 per person and welcome emails #2 to #5 about $0.10 each. Compare each email to others of the same type, and to your own history.
Is revenue per recipient the same as revenue per email?
Close, but not quite. Revenue per email usually means total revenue for one send. Revenue per recipient divides that by how many people got it, so you can compare a send to 5,000 people with a send to 50,000.
Should campaigns and flows be compared on revenue per recipient?
You can, but expect flows to win. Flows reach people at a moment that matters, like right after they sign up or when they're about to run out. Compare flows to flows and campaigns to campaigns for decisions.
Why is my revenue per recipient going down as my list grows?
Often it's because you're sending to more people who aren't paying attention. The fitness tech brand's full-list blast earned $0.04 per person against $0.19 for its engaged segment. Tightening who gets each send tends to help.
Does revenue per recipient include SMS?
It can, depending on how you pull it. Klaviyo's benchmarks report shows email and SMS revenue per recipient separately. Keep them separate so one doesn't hide the other.
Founder of Bardown Digital, a Chicago-based Klaviyo email and retention agency for Shopify brands. He's worked with brands doing $500K to $100M a year, with $100M+ in email-attributed revenue across them.