What your listis actually worth.
Email is the highest ROI channel in marketing, studies put it around $36 back for every $1 spent, but most businesses have no idea what their own list earns. Plug in your numbers and see the revenue per send, per month, and per year, your return on cost, and the dollar value of a single subscriber.
Your numbers
Active, deliverable subscribers.
% of recipients who open. Industry average is around 21%.
% of openers who click a link. ~10 to 12% is typical.
% of clickers who buy.
Revenue per conversion.
Campaigns plus automated emails per month.
Platform, tools, and production cost per month.
The verdict
Revenue / month
$10,752
Profit / month
$10,652
Revenue / year
$129,024
Return on cost
10,652.0%
Revenue ÷ cost.
Value / subscriber / yr
$13
Revenue / send
$2,688
Monthly: revenue vs cost vs profit
Scenario · the open-rate lever
What a better open rate is worth
Revenue / month
$10,752
vs now
$0
Open rate is the top of the email funnel, so it scales everything below it. Moving from 35% to 35% changes monthly revenue by $0 — usually won with subject lines and list hygiene, not more sends.
Sensitivity · revenue by open rate
Same list, different engagement
| Open rate | Revenue / month | Revenue / year |
|---|---|---|
| 15% | $4,608 | $55,296 |
| 25% | $7,680 | $92,160 |
| 35% | $10,752 | $129,024 |
| 45% | $13,824 | $165,888 |
| 55% | $16,896 | $202,752 |
The same list earns wildly different money depending on how many actually open. That's why deliverability and subject lines are revenue work, not housekeeping.
Your move
Email is the channel everyone underuses. I make it the one that pays the rent.
Email earns $10,752/mo ($129,024/yr) at 10,652% ROI — $13/subscriber/yr.
Most businesses sit on a list worth a fortune and email it twice a year. I build the flows, the campaigns, and the offers that turn a quiet list into reliable revenue. Send me your numbers and I'll show you, free, where the easy money is.
Plain English
The cheapest audience you'll ever own.
Email ROI is the revenue your email program returns against what it costs to run. The reason it's the darling of every marketing report is simple: you already own the audience. There's no per click auction, no platform tax on reach, once someone's on your list, emailing them is nearly free, so almost all the revenue drops to profit.
The math is a funnel. Your list size times your open rate gives openers; openers times click rate gives clicks; clicks times conversion rate gives buyers; buyers times average order value gives revenue. Multiply by how often you send and you have a monthly and annual number. Subtract your platform and production cost and you have ROI, usually a number that makes paid ads look expensive.
This calculator runs that funnel live and adds the figure that reframes everything: value per subscriber, your annual email revenue divided by your list. Once you know a subscriber is worth, say, $4 a year, every decision changes. Suddenly a lead magnet, a popup, or a $2 cost per lead ad to grow the list is obviously worth it.
The formula
Revenue = list × open% × click% × conversion% × AOV
10,000 subscribers × 35% open = 3,500 opens × 12% click = 420 clicks × 8% conversion = 33.6 orders × $80 = ~$2,688 per send. At 4 sends a month that's ~$10,750/month and ~$129,000/year. Against $100/month in cost, that's an ROI in the thousands of percent, and about $12.90 of annual value per subscriber.
Email benchmarks by industry
Average open and click rates vary by industry. Use these to sanity check your inputs, if your rates are well below your industry, the fix is engagement and list health, not just sending more:
| Industry | Avg open rate | Avg click rate |
|---|---|---|
| E-commerce / retail | 18.4% | 2% |
| Software / SaaS | 22% | 2.2% |
| Media & publishing | 22.1% | 4.6% |
| Nonprofit | 26.6% | 2.7% |
| Professional services | 21.9% | 2.6% |
| Health & wellness | 23.4% | 2.9% |
| Finance & insurance | 21.6% | 2.7% |
| Education | 23.4% | 2.9% |
Source: Mailchimp / Campaign Monitor email benchmarks · 2025
Your email revenue is lower than it should be. Why?
Open rate below industry average.
A deliverability or subject line problem. Clean your list, authenticate your domain, and test sharper subjects, opens gate everything downstream.
Good opens, weak clicks.
Your content or offer isn't compelling enough, or there's no clear single call to action. One email, one ask, one obvious button.
Clicks but no conversions.
The landing page is breaking the promise the email made. Match the page to the email's message and remove friction at checkout.
High value per subscriber, small list.
You're under investing in growth. If each subscriber is worth $10+/year, spending to acquire them is a no brainer, turn on lead capture and paid list growth.
Sending rarely.
You're leaving money on the table. Most lists can handle more frequency than owners fear, segment by engagement and email your actives more often.
How to grow email revenue
01Turn on the core automations
Welcome, abandoned cart, browse abandonment, and post purchase flows are the highest ROI emails you'll ever send, they hit people at peak intent, automatically.
02Segment by engagement
Email your most engaged subscribers more and your dormant ones less. It lifts revenue and protects deliverability at the same time.
03Lift average order value
Bundles, upsells, and thresholds raise revenue per conversion with no extra sends. AOV flows straight through the whole funnel.
04Grow the list deliberately
Once you know value per subscriber, fund list growth, lead magnets, popups, paid acquisition, up to that value. Most businesses massively under invest here.
05Improve the worst funnel stage
Find whether opens, clicks, or conversions is your weakest step and fix that one first. Compounding the bottleneck moves the whole number.
06Clean the list regularly
Sunset chronically unengaged subscribers. A smaller, active list earns more and lands in more inboxes than a big, dead one.
The vocabulary
- Email ROI
- Revenue generated by email divided by its cost. Frequently cited around 36:1, the highest of any channel.
- Open rate
- Share of recipients who open an email. Gates every downstream metric (and is now inflated by Apple Mail Privacy).
- Click rate
- Here, the share of openers who click a link, also called click to open rate (CTOR).
- Value per subscriber
- Annual email revenue ÷ list size. The number that tells you how much a new subscriber is worth winning.
- Conversion rate
- Share of clickers who complete the desired action, usually a purchase.
Email ROI questions, straight answers
Widely cited studies (DMA, Litmus) put email marketing ROI around $36 for every $1 spent, the highest of any marketing channel. Your own number depends on your list quality, send frequency, and offer, which is exactly what this calculator works out for you rather than quoting an average.
Keep going
A calculator tells you what. A call tells you what to do about it.
Send me the account behind these numbers. I'll tell you straight where the money's leaking and what I'd fix first — free, and you keep it whether you hire me or not.