What is your email list worth?
Enter your list size, open rate, CTR, and AOV. Get revenue per send, monthly revenue, profit, and the dollars-returned-per-dollar-spent ratio in real time.
How email ROI is calculated.
Five numbers drive email revenue: list size, open rate, click-through rate, conversion rate, and average order value. ROI is what falls out the bottom after you subtract your ESP cost.
Revenue per send
List × Open% × CTR-of-clicker × AOV
The expected revenue from sending one email to your active list. CTR here is the click-through rate of openers, not of total sent. Most ESPs report CTR-of-sent, so we convert internally.
Monthly revenue
Revenue per send × sends / month
Multiply per-send revenue by frequency. Doubling sends does not double revenue because audience fatigue lowers per-send rates above 4-8 sends per month for most lists.
ROI multiple
(Monthly revenue - ESP cost) / ESP cost
The famous "$36 returned per $1 spent" figure. If ESP cost is zero (e.g. free tier), this metric is undefined; use monthly profit instead. Industry-wide average is 36x per the DMA.
Revenue per subscriber
Monthly revenue / active subscribers
RPS is the cleanest health metric for an email list. Top-quartile creators sit at $1-$3 per subscriber per month; the median small-business list is closer to $0.30-$0.80. RPS normalizes for list size and reveals offer-fit quality.
Email benchmarks by industry
| Industry | Open rate | CTR | Click-to-open |
|---|---|---|---|
| Government & education | 28.8% | 3.6% | 12.5% |
| Arts & entertainment | 26.7% | 3.0% | 11.2% |
| Hobbies & creative | 27.7% | 5.0% | 18.1% |
| Marketing & advertising | 20.5% | 1.8% | 8.8% |
| E-commerce & retail | 18.4% | 2.0% | 10.9% |
| Health & fitness | 21.5% | 2.4% | 11.2% |
| Cross-industry average | 21.3% | 2.6% | 12.2% |
Source: Mailchimp Email Marketing Benchmarks 2024. ROI baseline: $36 returned per $1 spent (DMA Marketer Email Tracker 2022, Litmus State of Email 2023 corroborates at $36-$42).
Honest answers.
The DMA's 2022 Marketer Email Tracker found an average return of $36 for every $1 spent on email marketing, making it the highest-ROI channel measured. Litmus has reported similar numbers in the $36-$42 range. For most small businesses, anything above $20 per $1 spent is healthy; under $10 means the list, the offer, or the targeting is weak. Note that the DMA average includes large brands with sophisticated segmentation; a solo creator with a 1,000-subscriber list can still hit $40+ per $1 if the offer-audience match is tight.
Mailchimp's 2024 benchmark report puts the cross-industry average open rate at 21.33%. Government and education see 28-30%; arts and entertainment around 27%; e-commerce around 18%. Anything above 25% is strong, anything below 15% suggests deliverability, list-quality, or subject-line issues. Apple's Mail Privacy Protection inflates reported opens by 5-15 points since 2021, so compare yourself to your own historical trend rather than published averages whenever possible.
The cross-industry average click-through rate (CTR) is 2.62% according to Mailchimp 2024. CTR is more reliable than open rate because it's not distorted by privacy filters. Click-to-open rate (CTOR), which divides clicks by opens, ranges 10-15% in healthy lists; below 8% suggests the email body or CTA is weak. The single biggest CTR lever is one clear primary CTA above the fold; emails with 3+ links typically convert less, not more.
Email marketing ROI = (revenue from email - cost of email) / cost of email, expressed as a multiple or percentage. Revenue is recipients × open rate × CTR × conversion rate × AOV, summed across all sends in the period. Cost is your ESP fee plus any extra cost of producing the campaign (designer, copywriter, list-cleaning tools). For solo creators, ESP cost is usually the dominant variable: at $30/month and $1,200/month revenue, ROI is 39x ($1,170 / $30). The metric is often reported as "dollars returned per dollar spent" for readability.
Top-quartile lists generate $1-$3 per subscriber per month; the median small-business list is closer to $0.30-$0.80 per subscriber per month. The metric is called revenue-per-subscriber (RPS) and is a better health check than list size because it normalizes for engagement and offer quality. To get above $1/sub/month consistently, you typically need an evergreen offer running in the background plus 4-8 sends per month including launches and promotions. Pure newsletter lists with no offers often track below $0.10/sub/month.
No, segment by engagement. Send promotional emails to subscribers who opened or clicked something in the last 30-90 days. Inactive subscribers hurt deliverability disproportionately: a 10% spam-complaint rate from a stale segment can cost you inbox placement for the whole list for weeks. The healthier pattern is two segments: an engaged segment that gets every campaign, and a sunset sequence that tries to win back 90+ day inactives over 3-5 emails before scrubbing them. Most ESPs charge by total subscriber count, so cleaning inactives also lowers cost.
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