Is your email really working?

The question behind the question

Almost nobody asks whether email works in general. They ask whether theirs is doing anything, because the dashboard says one thing and the bank says another. These five checks settle it in about ten minutes. Every figure below came off a live store.

One: compare sends against list size

Open the flow. Compare emails sent against the number of people who should have received them. On one account a 13 email weekly sequence showed live for three weeks and had sent seven emails to a list of 488. The platform's own screen eventually put it plainly: received no emails, 438 of 488. A sequence that size should produce thousands of sends in a quarter. If the ratio is wrong, the flow is not running, whatever the status badge says.

Two: check what the flow triggers on

That flow was set to trigger on Added to List, and that trigger only fires forward. The 488 were already on the list before the flow existed, so none of them ever entered. Nothing in the interface flags it. Removing and re adding people through the API does not fire it either. The fix is the platform's own function for adding past profiles, and you want those people started at the beginning of the sequence rather than placed where they would be today, or they land past the end and receive almost nothing.

Three: stop reading the open rate

One account showed a 92 percent open rate, from 238 opens on 263 sends. Apple Mail pre fetches images, which records an open whether or not a person ever looked, and on a small send base that distortion is enormous. Any open rate above roughly 50 percent is describing machines. Read click rate, revenue per recipient and average order value instead. On that same account, a 5.31 percent click rate and a $359.43 average order value both survived scrutiny. The full breakdown.

Four: count the people each flow can actually reach

Before rewriting a single subject line, work out the size of the pool. On a store doing about 7,500 sessions a month there were 46 checkout starts and 35 completed orders, which left roughly eight people a month who could receive an abandoned cart email. Browse abandonment had a different ceiling: the store could identify about 0.8 percent of its visitors. Neither problem is a copy problem. The cart arithmetic and the identification ceiling.

Five: check what email earns against your own order records

On one store the email platform claimed 36 to 42 percent of revenue, depending on which total you divide by. The store's own order records credited email with 21 percent as charged, and 35 percent once bulk orders were counted at full contract value on the day they were placed. The platform counted 23 conversions where the store's records showed 10 email orders, because it credits an order when the buyer opened or clicked within a few days, and it will credit one order to several emails. Both numbers are defensible. Only one of them is what the business earned.

The ten minute version

Sends against list size. The trigger type on every flow that matters. Click rate and revenue per recipient in place of opens. The size of the pool each flow can reach. Email revenue on your own order records, sat next to the platform's figure. When one of those comes back wrong, the repair is structural. It is almost never a better subject line.