# Which of your email campaigns actually make money?

> Open rate can't tell you which campaigns sold. Rank your sends by revenue per recipient, then look at what the winners have in common.

By The Wizel Team · Published 2026-10-01

Most stores judge a campaign by its open rate. It's the first number Klaviyo shows you, and it's the least useful one for deciding what to send next. A campaign is there to sell something, so start with the money and work backwards.

## Why open rate misleads

Apple Mail Privacy Protection, launched in 2021, loads emails in the background, so many opens are recorded even when nobody read the email. That inflates open rates for lists with lots of Apple Mail users and makes small changes hard to read.

Clicks are more honest, but a click is a visit, not a purchase. A campaign with a modest click rate can outsell one with a high click rate if the people who clicked were ready to buy.

## Three numbers that tell you a campaign worked

**3 numbers** revenue per recipient, placed order rate and unsubscribe rate, read together

- Revenue per recipient: the revenue Klaviyo credits to the campaign, divided by the number of people who received it. It's the fairest way to compare a send to 2,000 VIPs with a send to 40,000 subscribers.
- Placed order rate: the share of recipients who ordered inside your attribution window. It tells you whether the email moved people to buy, not just to look.
- Unsubscribe rate: what the send cost you. A campaign that earns well but loses an unusual number of subscribers is borrowing from your next sends.

## How to find your winners

1. Pull every campaign from the last 90 days with its recipients, attributed revenue and unsubscribes.
2. Sort by revenue per recipient, not total revenue. Big sends win on totals because they're big.
3. Put the top five and the bottom five side by side. Note the audience, the offer, the subject line, the send day and the kind of email: launch, restock, story or sale.
4. Write down what the top five share. That's the start of next month's plan.

You're looking for a pattern you can act on. Maybe launches to your engaged segment beat everything else. Maybe story emails earn less on the day but lose fewer subscribers. Whatever it turns out to be, it's specific to your store, which makes it worth more than any industry average.

> Compare campaigns on revenue per recipient. Total revenue mostly tells you how big the list was.

## Ask your own numbers in Wizel

With your Klaviyo account connected, you can type questions like these into the Wizel chat and get answers from your own campaign data:

- “Which campaigns made the most money last month?”
- “Compare email vs SMS campaign performance for last quarter.”
- “Show me campaign performance by day for the last 30 days.”

## FAQ

### What's a good revenue per recipient for an email campaign?

It depends on your prices, your list and how often you send, so the most useful benchmark is your own. Work out your median for the last 90 days of campaigns and study anything well above it.

### Should I still look at open rates?

As a rough health check, yes. A sudden drop can point to a deliverability problem. Just don't use opens to pick winners, because Apple Mail Privacy Protection records opens nobody made.

### Why doesn't Klaviyo's campaign revenue match Shopify?

Klaviyo credits an order to an email when the buyer opened or clicked it within your attribution window, which is five days by default. Shopify counts each order once, wherever it came from. Our guide to email-attributed revenue explains the gap.

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Source: Wizel (https://www.wizel.ai/blog/which-email-campaigns-make-money)
Last updated: 2026-10-01