Email flow revenue estimator
This estimator follows a group of people through one email in a flow: how many open it, how many of those click, how many of those buy, and what those orders are worth. You enter the number of people who will enter the flow, your open rate, your click rate among openers, your conversion rate among clickers and your average order value. It returns orders, revenue and revenue per thousand recipients, which is the figure that lets you compare a flow against a campaign or against another flow. It models a single send. For a three-email flow, run it once per email with the smaller audience that reaches each later step, then add the results.
Revenue from the flow
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- Orders from the flow
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- Revenue per thousand recipients
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Plain arithmetic on your inputs. Nothing is sent anywhere. Not a forecast.
The funnel, one step at a time
Start with the people entering the flow. Multiply by the open rate to get opens. Multiply opens by the click rate to get clicks. Multiply clicks by the conversion rate to get orders. Multiply orders by average order value to get revenue. With 5,000 entrants, a 40 percent open rate gives 2,000 opens; 8 percent of those clicking gives 160 clicks; 5 percent of clicks buying gives 8 orders; at 70 dollars each that is 560 dollars. Revenue per thousand divides that revenue by the entrants in thousands, so 560 divided by 5 is 112 dollars per thousand people who entered.
Why revenue per thousand is the number to keep
Flow revenue on its own rises and falls with how many people enter, which depends on traffic and sign-ups rather than on the email. Revenue per thousand strips that out and shows how well the email itself converts attention into orders. Use it to rank your flows, to decide which one to rewrite first and to compare a flow against a one-off campaign to the same audience. A welcome flow and an abandoned checkout flow will have very different figures, because the people entering them are at different points, so compare like with like.
Which input to improve first
Because the steps multiply, a change at any step moves revenue by the same proportion, but the steps are not equally easy to move. Open rate is mostly the subject line and the sender name, and it is affected by mail client privacy features that inflate it. Click rate is the offer and the layout, and it responds fast to a clearer single call to action. Conversion among clickers is the landing page and the checkout, which are the same conversion lever the rest of the site depends on. Fix the step with the weakest figure relative to your other flows, then rerun the estimate.
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