Email ROI Calculator

Everything the campaign consumed: the prorated slice of your email platform subscription, design and copy time (at a realistic hourly value, even if it is your own), any list-cleaning or deliverability tools, and paid incentives like discount codes if you want a stricter view. Counting only the platform fee flatters the ROI.

Most platforms attribute a purchase if the buyer clicked (or sometimes just opened) the email within a window — typically 3–5 days. Click-based attribution with a short window is the honest default; open-based attribution over-credits email badly, especially since Apple Mail Privacy Protection inflates opens. Whatever model you pick, keep it constant across campaigns so comparisons mean something.

For a single promotional send, 300–800% is common and healthy. Program-wide figures like the often-quoted 3,600% include automated flows — welcome, abandoned cart, post-purchase — which are the real ROI engines because they run on near-zero marginal cost. If your one-off campaigns beat your flows, your automations need work, not your newsletters.

Because the audience is already acquired. Ads pay for every impression on strangers; email re-contacts people who opted in, at a marginal cost of fractions of a cent per send. The catch is that email cannot scale by spending more — its ceiling is your list size and health, which is why list growth and paid acquisition remain complements, not substitutes.