Email Marketing ROI for Shopify Stores: Counting the Real Costs

Why most email return figures flatter the channel

Email platforms report the sales they helped produce, and they report them generously. An order counts as email revenue if the customer opened or clicked something within the platform's own window, whether or not the email changed their mind. Set that revenue against the monthly invoice alone and email looks astonishingly profitable.

A fairer picture needs two more things: the time that goes into email, and the margin on the sales it is credited with. The email marketing ROI calculator asks for both, and shows the return on revenue or on gross profit, plus how many days of a month email takes to earn back its costs.

Counting what email really costs

• The platform bill. If you pay yearly, use what it comes to for one month so the month matches a month of results.
• Other spending. A freelance writer, a designer, a template pack, a deliverability add-on.
• Time. Planning, writing, building, checking and fixing. Put a value on each hour that reflects what that hour could otherwise earn the business.

Take an imaginary coffee roaster paying 60 dollars a month for its platform, with the owner spending about 10 hours a month on email at a value of 40 dollars an hour. Once that time is counted, email costs it far more than the 60 dollar bill suggests.

Return on revenue or return on profit

A return measured on revenue is always the larger figure, and it can mislead a store with thin margins. If the roaster's email brought in 6,200 dollars of sales at a 55 percent gross margin, the calculator puts the return at about 7.41 dollars of gross profit for each dollar spent. Still a strong channel, but a very different number from the one on the platform dashboard.

Look at the net figure beside the ratio as well. A high ratio on a tiny bill can still be a small amount of money, and a lower ratio on a larger programme can be worth far more to the business.

When email does not pay its way

If the costs come out ahead of the return, check the tracking first. Orders from email are often missed when customers switch devices or come back through search. Then look at the list itself: a programme that mails very few people struggles to cover the time it takes, however good the emails are. Finally, look for time that can be saved with automated flows that keep working without a weekly send.

Return per campaign versus value per subscriber

The return calculation answers whether email as a whole is worth what you put into it. A different question is what each person on the list is worth, which tells you how much you can afford to spend gaining a subscriber. For that, use the email list value calculator. The two work well together: one prices the channel, the other prices the audience.

Nudgesmart grows that audience on the storefront with signup popups built from ready-made templates, and on paid plans it connects to Klaviyo, one of its listed integrations. It is available on the Shopify App Store.