Revenue per recipient (RPR) is the revenue an email or flow produced divided by the number of people who received it. If a campaign delivered to 20,000 contacts is credited with £3,000 in sales, its RPR is £0.15. It shows what each email is worth in pounds, rather than how many people opened it.
How revenue per recipient works
The calculation is simple: attributed revenue divided by recipients. The detail is in both halves.
Recipients usually means emails delivered, excluding bounces, though some platforms divide by emails sent. Check which, and use the same basis every time.
Revenue is whatever your email platform or analytics tool credits to the email, based on its attribution window. Many email platforms count a purchase if the recipient opened or clicked within a set number of days. Because opens are inflated by Apple Mail Privacy Protection, an open-based window can credit email with sales it did not influence. GA4 often shows a lower figure for the same email, because it credits sales to tracked sessions rather than to anyone who opened. Neither is wrong; they answer different questions.
A worked example: Campaign A goes to 20,000 people and is credited with £3,000, an RPR of £0.15. Campaign B goes to a segment of 4,000 recent buyers and is credited with £1,200, an RPR of £0.30. A made more in total, but B earned twice as much per person emailed, which suggests targeted sends deserve more of your time. Automated flows often show a higher RPR than campaigns, because they reach people at a moment of intent, such as just after leaving a basket.
Why it matters
Open rate and click rate measure attention. RPR ties email to money, which is what most UK small business owners need to know when deciding whether to send another campaign, build a new flow or spend on growing the list. It also corrects for list size: total revenue always looks better on bigger sends, while RPR shows whether each extra recipient is worth reaching.
It helps with list decisions too. If mailing your inactive segment yields an RPR close to zero while adding complaints, that is a clear case for re-engagement or removal rather than more sends.
Common mistakes
- Comparing RPR across platforms or businesses that use different attribution windows.
- Counting revenue including VAT in one report and excluding it in another.
- Taking platform-attributed revenue at face value when much of it comes from opens alone.
- Comparing a flow’s RPR with a campaign’s and concluding campaigns are worthless; they do different jobs.
- Ignoring refunds and returns, which can make a discount-heavy campaign look better than it was.
How to act on it
Check your email platform’s attribution settings and note the window and whether opens count. If you can, switch to click-based attribution, or at least report a click-only view alongside the default. Decide whether you report revenue with or without VAT, and stick to it.
Then track RPR per campaign and per flow over time, alongside unsubscribes and complaints. Use it to compare segments, offers and sending frequency, and to see whether list growth is adding value or just volume. Set it against average order value and customer lifetime value to judge what a subscriber is worth; my LTV and CAC calculator helps you work out a sensible cost for each new customer. Building this kind of reporting is part of my digital marketing strategy and consulting work.