Most brands hit a wall with email and arrive at the same conclusion: send more. It’s almost always the wrong call.
The average email returns between $36 and $42 for every dollar spent. Some brands hit $76. But that number isn’t evenly distributed. It piles up in the brands that have figured out what email is actually for, and goes flat in the ones still using it like a megaphone.
The difference usually isn’t the creative. It’s what they’re measuring, and where they’re putting their energy. We see it across every vertical we work in: CPG, spirits, hospitality, outdoor. The pattern holds.
Stop leading with open rates
Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection pre-loads tracking pixels whether or not anyone actually reads your email. Open rates are inflated across the board and only 15% of marketers still treat them as a primary metric. A sudden drop is still a signal worth catching, it usually means something’s gone wrong with deliverability, but as a day-to-day read on whether your email is working, it’s not giving you much.
CTR, click-to-open rate, and revenue per recipient are the numbers worth caring about. They measure what someone did, not how their email client behaved.
CTR above 2.5% is solid. Above 3.5% is excellent. CTOR, the percentage of people who opened and then clicked, averages around 6.8% across industries, but the range is wide. Manufacturing hits nearly 15%. Beauty sits closer to 4%. If your CTOR is strong but your overall CTR is weak, the list is the problem, not the content.
The number that should change your strategy
Automated flows account for just 5.3% of email sends. They generate nearly 41% of total email revenue, with revenue per recipient almost 18 times higher than standard campaigns.
The emails most teams spend the least time on are doing the most work. A flow email lands when someone is already thinking about you. A campaign lands when you decided it was time to say something. That gap in timing is worth more than almost any creative call you’ll make.
Welcome sequences, abandoned browse flows, post-purchase series. For most brands these are the real revenue engine of the email program, running in the background while the team is focused on the next campaign.
What good looks like
Unsubscribe rates should sit below 0.5%. Bounce rates below 2%. When unsubscribes start creeping up, the instinct is to pull back on frequency, but it’s usually a segmentation issue. The wrong message is reaching the wrong people.
The brands doing well at email right now aren’t the ones sending the most. They have clean lists, flows that actually work, and campaigns that feel considered rather than scheduled. The founder-led brands we work with tend to have a head start here. They know their customer, they write like a person, and they don’t send email just because it’s Tuesday.
If performance is flat, look at your flows before you change anything else. Check deliverability. Pull CTR by segment rather than the overall blended number. The answer is usually in there, and it’s rarely “send more.”
Oakpool manages email across Klaviyo, Mailchimp, and HubSpot for brands across CPG, spirits, hospitality, and outdoor.
