Hey,

Quick one today.

While auditing a brand with genuinely strong repeat purchase, I checked one number that almost nobody looks at: what share of total revenue comes from email.

Theirs was 16%. For a brand like that, the healthy range I use is 25 to 35%.

That gap is invisible on a day-to-day basis, and it’s enormous.

It means the cheapest channel they own has quietly been delivering about half of what it should, month after month, while everyone stared at the ads dashboard.

That’s the pattern I see everywhere.

Paid gets watched daily because it has a dashboard that yells and a bill that hurts.

Email fails silently.

The flows were built once, years ago, by someone who has since left.

Campaigns go out when someone remembers.

And when revenue dips, everybody interrogates the ad account, because that’s where the buttons are.

Meanwhile email costs almost nothing per send, works while you sleep, and gets stronger with every customer your ads win.

Every point of revenue you shift onto it makes the whole business more profitable and less hostage to ad platform mood swings.

That matters double in Q4, when ad costs spike and owned revenue is what protects your margin.

The 15-Minute Check

Open your email platform and pull three numbers for the last 30 days:

1. Email’s share of total store revenue. Use conservative, click-based attribution, because email platforms flatter themselves just like ad platforms do. Klaviyo defaults to generous attribution windows, since every platform likes looking valuable, so tighten the setting before you trust the number. With real repeat-purchase behavior, 25 to 35% is healthy. Under 25% means there’s money sitting in your list.
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2. Flows vs campaigns split. Flows should carry roughly half or more of your email revenue. They run 24/7 without anyone lifting a finger, so if campaigns dominate, you’re doing manual labor to compensate for broken automation.
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3. The core four, alive and current. Welcome, abandoned checkout, post-purchase, winback. Check the last-updated date on each. If a flow still references products from two catalogs ago, that flow retired years ago and forgot to tell anyone.

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If the share sits under 25%, fix the flows before you spend another dollar on ad experiments.

It’s the rare growth lever with no auction, no CPM inflation, and no algorithm deciding your fate.

I talked about the retention side of this on the podcast here: Email Marketing That Drives 40%+ Revenue: List Growth, Offers & Retention with Max Sturtevant​

You’d never let your ad account run unwatched for a year, yet most founders do exactly that with email.

Your ad account gets judged every morning.

Give the channel you actually own the same treatment once a quarter.

Talk soon,
Andrej

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PS: Reply “flows” and I’ll send you the full flow framework we recommend clients with every single flow and every single email that should go out.