If you buy traffic for your webshop, email decides how much of it you can sell to again, which is why the share of revenue it brings in gets so much attention. Ask how much that share should be and you will find confident answers. Agency websites quote 30% or more as the level to aim for, and some go as high as 40%.

We don't use a target like that, because the right share depends on what you sell and how you sell it. For some brands, 15 to 20% of revenue from email is a strong result.

Why a single target misleads

Three things change the share a lot, and none of them say much about how well email is run.

What you sell. A store selling consumables that run out every month has customers who are ready to buy again on a schedule. A store selling furniture may see the same customer once every few years. The second store can run excellent email and still have a lower share than the first.

How much paid traffic you buy. If a large part of your revenue comes from first orders driven by ads, email's share of the total will be smaller, even when email performs well. Grow ad spend and the share can fall while email revenue rises.

What email can't see. One retailer we spoke with has more than 100 million kroner of revenue in its physical stores. Sales in those stores don't show up in Klaviyo's numbers, so measured as a share of total revenue, email looks small.

In the accounts we audit, email often brings in somewhere between 4% and 12% of total revenue. That tells you where many stores are, and it tells you nothing about where yours should be.

Compare the account with itself

A more useful question is whether email is doing what it should with the customers and traffic you already have. You can answer it from inside your own account.

Flow revenue and campaign revenue

Flows run on their own and react to what a customer does: signing up, abandoning a cart, buying, going quiet. If almost all your email revenue comes from campaigns, the automated part is doing too little, and revenue depends on how often someone remembers to send.

Your list and your traffic

Divide new subscribers in a month by visitors in the same month. That is the share of your paid traffic you can reach again. In the accounts we audit, signup forms often have a submit rate between 0.5% and 5% of the people who see them. In our client accounts, rates between 8% and 19% are common.

Subscribers who have never bought

In the accounts we audit, between 50% and 88% of subscribers have never placed an order, around 70% on average. A list like that is mostly people you have not yet converted, and flows aimed at them are often where the quickest gains sit.

The trend over time

Compare this quarter with the same quarter last year. Email revenue that grows faster than total revenue is a better sign than any single share.

What a big jump looks like

FemiEko, one of our clients, went from 14% to 54% of total revenue from email. That number says more about how much was missing at the start than about a level other stores should copy. The point is the change, measured inside one business.

Where Markeity comes in

When we look at an account, we compare it with itself rather than with a benchmark. To run the comparison yourself, start with How to check a Klaviyo account in 15 minutes. If you want that comparison for your store, book a free 15-minute call. For the bigger picture of what a customer is worth to you, read What you can afford to pay for a customer, and how to raise it.