Email Marketing ROI Calculator
Return on an email campaign counting the hours as well as the platform fee, with the open rate labelled unreliable since Apple began prefetching pixels.
Sent 24,000
Delivered 23,400, 97.5%
bounced 600, 2.5%
Clicks, unique 1,170, 5% of delivered
Orders 94, 8.03% of clicks
Revenue $7,802.00
Cost
platform and sending $180.00
time $585.00 (9.0 h at $65.00)
total $765.00
Profit $7,037.00
Return on spend 10.20×
ROI 919.9%
Per email
revenue $0.3334
cost $0.0327
profit $0.3007
Per order
average value $83.00
cost to get it $8.14
Open rate 40% ← treat as unreliable
why Apple Mail prefetches tracking pixels, so an open is not a read
Click to open 12.5%
why that too it divides by the same unreliable number
Unsubscribes 78, 0.333%
revenue per unsubscribe $100.03 this send
what it costs long term every future email to that person, which this send does not pay for
Open rate is 40% here and it is not a measurement. Since September 2021
Apple Mail Privacy Protection has fetched tracking pixels through a
proxy for everyone who enabled it, so an open is recorded whether or not
a person looked at the message. Apple Mail is a large share of consumer
email, which means reported open rates rose without anything improving
and cannot be compared with anything from before that date.
Clicks and orders survive because they require an action. Judge a
subject line on clicks rather than opens, accept that the test is
noisier as a result, and stop reporting open rate as a success measure
to anyone making decisions.
The return is 10.20 times the spend, and the spend includes the time:
$585.00 of it, against $180.00 of platform fees. Leaving the hours out
is how email comes to look like the highest-return channel there is.
Revenue per email delivered is $0.3334. That is the number to carry into
a conversation about list growth, because it sets what a subscriber is
worth over a year of sends and therefore what acquiring one may cost.
A list decays by roughly a quarter a year through job changes, abandoned
addresses and quiet disengagement. A list that is not growing is
shrinking, and a re-engagement campaign to people who have not opened in
a year mostly damages deliverability.
Deliverability is the ceiling on all of this. A hard bounce rate above
about two percent or a complaint rate above about a tenth of a percent
puts sending reputation at risk, and once inbox placement drops every
rate on this page falls with it. Stop sending to a hard bounce
immediately.
An unsubscribe costs more than this campaign shows. The loss is every
future send to that person, so a send that makes its numbers by mailing
the whole list more often can be profitable this week and expensive over
a year.
The revenue figure only means something if the attribution does. Email
is usually credited on last click, which flatters it: a customer who was
going to buy anyway and clicked the email on the way is counted as an
email sale. The attribution model calculator on this site shows how much
that choice moves.
Output is valid and updates as you type.
Fix the highlighted fields to update the output.
Email is usually reported as the highest-return channel in marketing, and part of that is an accounting choice: the platform fee gets counted and the hours do not.
A campaign with a $180 send cost and nine hours of somebody’s week has a real cost of $765, not $180. That is still a 10.2× return on $7,802 of revenue, which is excellent. It is not the 43× that the platform fee alone would have suggested.
The other thing this does is demote the open rate. Since September 2021, Apple Mail Privacy Protection has prefetched tracking pixels through a proxy for everyone who enabled it, and an open is recorded by loading that pixel. So an open is no longer evidence that a human saw the message, reported open rates rose without anything improving, and they cannot be compared against anything from before that date.
How to use
- Put in the sends, deliveries, unique clicks, orders and revenue.
- Put in the hours as well as the platform fee. This is the part that changes the answer.
- Read the open rate with its caveat, and judge the campaign on clicks and orders.
Example
Sent 24,000
Delivered 23,400, 97.5%
bounced 600, 2.5%
Clicks, unique 1,170, 5% of delivered
Orders 94, 8.03% of clicks
Revenue $7,802.00
Cost
platform and sending $180.00
time $585.00 (9.0 h at $65.00)
total $765.00
Profit $7,037.00
Return on spend 10.20×
ROI 919.9%
Per email
revenue $0.3334
cost $0.0327
profit $0.3007
Open rate 40% ← treat as unreliable
why Apple Mail prefetches tracking pixels, so an open is not a read
Click to open 12.5%
why that too it divides by the same unreliable number33 cents of revenue per email delivered is the number worth carrying into a conversation about list growth, because it sets what a subscriber is worth over a year of sends.
Pitfalls
Open rate is not a measurement any more. Apple Mail is a large share of consumer email and its privacy protection loads images for everyone with it on. Reported opens are inflated by an unknown amount that varies with your audience’s device mix, so an open-rate improvement is not evidence of anything.
Which makes click-to-open useless too. It divides by the same unreliable number. Use click rate against deliveries instead, and accept that subject-line tests are noisier than they used to be.
Count the hours. Writing, design, building, testing and segmenting are the real cost of email. A campaign that takes two days of a salaried person’s week is not cheap, and leaving that out is how email comes to look free.
Deliverability is the ceiling on everything here. A hard bounce rate above about 2 percent or a complaint rate above about 0.1 percent puts sending reputation at risk, and once inbox placement drops, every rate on this page falls with it. Stop sending to a hard bounce immediately.
A list decays by roughly a quarter a year. People change jobs, abandon addresses and quietly disengage. A list that is not growing is shrinking, and a re-engagement campaign to people who have not opened in a year mostly damages deliverability further.
An unsubscribe costs more than this campaign shows. The loss is every future send to that person, so a send that hits its number by mailing the whole list more often can be profitable this week and expensive over the year.
The revenue depends on the attribution. Email is usually credited on last click, which flatters it: a customer who was going to buy anyway and clicked the email on the way counts as an email sale. The attribution model calculator here shows how much that choice moves.
Use unique clicks, not total. A recipient clicking three links is one engaged person, and total clicks inflate the click rate in a way that is invisible unless you check which the platform reported.
Compatibility
Arithmetic in the browser: nothing is uploaded and nothing is stored, which matters for campaign figures.
Rates are computed against deliveries rather than sends, because a bounced email cannot be clicked. The per-email figures are shown to four decimal places, since they are fractions of a cent and rounding them to two would show zero.
Impossible funnels are refused rather than calculated: more deliveries than sends, more unique clicks than deliveries, or more orders than clicks all indicate two numbers from different reports or total clicks being used where unique were meant.
The open rate is computed and printed with its caveat rather than omitted, because it is what people come looking for and leaving it out invites getting it from somewhere that does not explain it.