09/09/2026
7,462 people got the email. 854 opened it.
It still made $10,000.
If you only looked at the open rate, you would have called this campaign a failure and rewritten the whole thing. Here is what open rate cannot tell you, and what to read instead.
$10,000 divided by 7,462 is 97 cents per person on the list. The ecommerce benchmark sits between 10 and 30 cents.
That one number beats open rate because it survives everything that makes open rate unreliable. Apple hides opens. Images get blocked. Bots inflate them. Nobody can fake revenue.
Clicks divided by opens. This campaign ran at 29.4%. Typical is 10 to 15%.
Here is why the pairing matters. Low opens with a high click-to-open rate means your offer is fine and your email is not reaching the inbox. High opens with a low click-to-open rate means the reverse: you are getting delivered, and the offer is not landing.
Two completely different problems, two completely different fixes, and open rate alone cannot tell them apart.
So $10,000 came from about 9% of the list. The other 6,800 did nothing.
The instinct is to say the list is weak. It is the opposite. The buyers were there the whole time. Earlier launches to this same list came in under $2,000, and the difference was not a better product or a better offer. It was finally reaching people who were already going to buy.
Which leads to the counterintuitive part... emailing fewer people would probably make more money.
Those 6,800 dead contacts are not neutral.
When most of your list ignores you, they start filing you under Promotions or spam for everyone, including the 680 who actually buy. Cutting the dead weight repairs placement for the people who matter.
What you can do with this information:
- Calculate revenue per recipient on your last campaign. Under 30 cents means there is real room.
- Calculate click-to-open. Over 20% and your offer is fine, so go fix delivery.
- Pull everyone who clicked and did not buy. Warmest segment you own, and almost nobody emails them separately.
- Pull everyone who has not opened in 90 days. Run a three-email win-back, then stop mailing whoever ignores all three. Do not unsubscribe them; just stop sending.
- Send emails twice based on segmentation. One follow-up on this campaign added another $2,784.
What is your revenue per recipient on your last send? Most people I ask have never run the number.
Happy to look at your email account with you. I promise we'll find something we can improve on. Book a free 30-minute call: calendly.com/localmarketing/strategysession
