At a glance
The single composite that lets a merchant glance at their email programme’s operational health in five seconds. Rolls up the four deliverability-and-engagement signals (delivery rate, open rate, click rate, bounce rate, unsubscribe rate) plus spam complaint rate into one card with traffic-light thresholds. If this card is green, no investigation needed; if amber, the breakdown points to which of the five sub-metrics is drifting; if red, escalate immediately.
| What it counts | A weighted composite of delivery_rate, open_rate, click_rate, bounce_rate, unsubscribe_rate, and spam_complaint_rate. Calculated as a 0-100 health score where 100 means every sub-metric is in its healthy band, 50 means at least one is flagged amber, below 30 means at least one is red and warrants immediate attention. |
| Definition of “sent” | Klaviyo’s recipients count (delivery attempts), inclusive of bounces. The composite uses the merchant’s actual send volume rather than only successful deliveries, which is what flags list-hygiene issues correctly. |
| Open rate basis | Klaviyo’s unique_opens / deliveries. iOS Mail Privacy Protection (MPP) inflates this by ~10-15 percentage points for brands with significant Apple-Mail recipient share. The composite weights opens at 15 percent rather than 30 percent specifically because of MPP-driven distortion. |
| Bounce handling | Hard + soft combined as Klaviyo reports them in 2024+ revisions (the platform stopped breaking them out separately in the 2024-10-15 API revision). The composite weights bounces at 25 percent, the second-highest weight after deliverability, because rising bounces signal list-hygiene problems that compound rapidly. |
| Attribution model | n/a, this is an operational-health composite, not a revenue-attribution card. Pair with Revenue per Recipient for the revenue-side view. |
| Currency | n/a. |
| Healthy band per sub-metric | Delivery rate >=98 percent, open rate >=20 percent (post-MPP, brand-vertical-dependent), click rate >=2 percent, bounce rate <=2 percent, unsubscribe rate <=0.5 percent, spam complaint rate <=0.1 percent. The composite uses these as the green-band defaults; merchants can override per profile. |
| Amber band per sub-metric | Delivery rate 95-98 percent, open rate 12-20 percent, click rate 1-2 percent, bounce rate 2-4 percent, unsubscribe rate 0.5-1 percent, spam complaint rate 0.1-0.3 percent. Drift into amber on any one signal is recoverable with focused work; sustained amber on multiple signals is the lead-up to a deliverability crisis. |
| Red band per sub-metric | Delivery rate <95 percent, open rate <12 percent, click rate <1 percent, bounce rate >4 percent, unsubscribe rate >1 percent, spam complaint rate >0.3 percent. Red on any single sub-metric warrants immediate investigation; red on bounce rate or spam complaint rate specifically warrants pausing campaigns until the underlying issue is resolved. |
| Time window | 30D blended view. Per-campaign breakdown available on the Engagement Funnel and Campaign Status Breakdown cards. |
| Alert trigger | - (composite has no single trigger; sub-metric alerts fire individually via the Alert Sender Reputation, Alert Bounce Spike, Alert Unsubscribe Spike, and Alert Deliverability Drop cards). |
| Roles | owner, marketing |
Calculation
Calculated automatically from your Klaviyo data. See the At a glance summary above for what the metric tracks and the worked example below for a typical reading.Worked example
A UK home-and-garden brand on Shopify with 86,000 active Klaviyo subscribers, sending 3 campaigns per week plus 6 always-on flows. Snapshot for the 30-day window ending Friday 17 May 26.| Sub-metric | Value | Band | Weight | Contribution |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Delivery rate | 96.8% | Amber | 25% | 16.5 |
| Open rate | 23.4% | Green | 15% | 15.0 |
| Click rate | 2.6% | Green | 15% | 15.0 |
| Bounce rate | 3.2% | Amber | 25% | 14.0 |
| Unsubscribe rate | 0.42% | Green | 10% | 10.0 |
| Spam complaint rate | 0.06% | Green | 10% | 10.0 |
| Composite score | 80.5 | Amber |
- Composite is amber, not red. Two sub-metrics in amber (delivery 96.8 percent, bounce 3.2 percent) and four in green produces a composite around 80, which the dashboard renders amber. The brand is not in crisis but is drifting in the wrong direction on the deliverability sub-signals.
- Delivery and bounce together signal list hygiene. When delivery rate drops while bounce rate rises, the cause is almost always accumulated dead contacts in the list. Hard-bounced addresses that haven’t been suppressed get re-attempted, fail again, and drag the delivery rate down by both the failure itself and the resulting reputation impact at receiving ISPs. The fix is mechanical: suppress the hard-bounced cohort, suppress contacts who haven’t engaged in 180+ days, then watch the composite rebound over 14-21 days.
- Why opens are still green. This brand’s customer base skews older and less Apple-Mail-heavy than fashion-and-beauty brands, so MPP inflation is more modest. A 23.4 percent open rate is genuine engagement signal, not artefact. Brands with iPhone-heavy customer bases would see this number 5-8 points higher purely from MPP effects.
- Click rate at 2.6 percent confirms content health. Even with deliverability drift, the customers who do receive emails are clicking through at expected rates. If click rate were also dropping while opens stayed flat, that would point to content issues (subject lines that promise more than the email delivers, click-through buttons that aren’t compelling). 2.6 percent click is fine; the problem is upstream of content.
- Spam complaint rate at 0.06 percent is excellent. Below 0.1 percent is the green band; sustained above 0.3 percent triggers ISP-level reputation damage. This brand is not in danger from spam complaints. The deliverability issue is from address quality (dead contacts), not from content quality (recipients flagging spam).
- The recovery playbook for this snapshot. (a) Run a list-hygiene pass: suppress all hard-bounced contacts and all contacts with no opens or clicks in 180+ days. Expected list reduction: 12-25 percent. (b) Resume normal campaign cadence to the cleaned list. (c) Monitor the composite weekly for 4-6 weeks. Expected recovery trajectory: bounce rate to <2 percent within 14 days, delivery rate to >98 percent within 21 days, composite to green (>=85) within 30 days. (d) Schedule a recurring quarterly hygiene pass thereafter to prevent recurrence.
- Identify which sub-metric(s) are flagged. The breakdown table shows which weights are dragging the composite. Two ambers always concentrate on either deliverability (delivery + bounce + spam clusters) or engagement (open + click + unsubscribe clusters), rarely both.
- Pair with the sender-reputation alert card. Alert Sender Reputation catches the underlying ISP-level signal that the composite is reflecting. If sender reputation is also flagged, the issue is established at the ISP level and recovery takes longer.
- Cross-check with campaign-level breakdown. Campaign Status Breakdown reveals whether the issue is concentrated on specific campaigns (content problem) or broadly distributed (list-hygiene or sender-reputation problem). Concentrated issues are content-fixable; distributed issues require list or sender-side intervention.
Sibling cards merchants should reference together
- Delivery Rate, Bounce Rate, Open Rate, Click Rate: the underlying sub-metrics composing this card. Drill into any sub-metric directly when the composite flags amber on that signal.
- Alert Sender Reputation is the leading-indicator alert that fires before sub-metrics drift far enough to flag amber on this composite. Subscribe to it for proactive deliverability monitoring.
- Alert Bounce Spike and Alert Deliverability Drop fire when specific sub-metrics breach the red band, complementing the composite view.
- Revenue per Recipient is the revenue-side counterpart. Brands look at both to triangulate: a green composite with falling revenue per recipient means the email programme is operationally fine but commercially failing (content or segmentation issue).
- List Health Summary decomposes list-quality drivers (engaged share, suppressed share, hard-bounced share, sleeping share) which are usually the upstream cause of any composite drift.
- Engagement Funnel is the funnel-shaped view of the same data, useful when the composite flags amber and the merchant wants to see drop-off at each step rather than only the rolled-up sub-metric values.
Reconciling against the vendor’s own dashboard
Where to look in Klaviyo’s own dashboard:- Analytics → Email Performance Dashboard for the rolled-up view of delivery, opens, clicks, bounces, unsubscribes across the merchant’s account. This is the closest single-screen analogue to the Vortex IQ composite.
- Settings → Account → Deliverability for the sender-reputation context that informs the underlying sub-metrics.
- Lists & Segments → Engagement Health for the list-side view that explains many composite-amber states (over-aggressive list growth, dormant cohort accumulation).
- The composite weights vs. equal-weighted aggregation. Vortex IQ weights bounce rate at 25 percent and open rate at 15 percent intentionally, because bounces predict deliverability degradation more reliably than opens (especially post-MPP). Klaviyo’s dashboard shows each metric without an opinionated weighting.
- Time-window alignment. Klaviyo’s defaults to a 30-day rolling window matching the Vortex IQ default; merchants who change Klaviyo’s window setting without updating Vortex IQ will see drift between the two views.
- Suppression-list handling timing. When the merchant suppresses contacts in bulk, Klaviyo’s deliverability metrics update in near-real-time but Vortex IQ syncs every 30 minutes; brief drift during a hygiene operation is expected and resolves on next sync.
- MPP-adjustment. Klaviyo’s UI shows raw open rate inclusive of MPP-driven opens. The Vortex IQ open-rate sub-metric and the composite weighting account for MPP inflation in interpretation, which can make the same raw number land in different bands across the two views.
- Klaviyo
klv_email_health_kpisvs Mailchimpmai_email_health_kpis: definitional twins on different platforms. Brands operating both for distinct audiences should compare composite scores directly; large gaps between the two for the same merchant typically point to one platform being under-suppressed (typically the newer integration where the merchant has not yet pushed a list-hygiene pass). - Klaviyo composite vs SendGrid or Postmark transactional health: NOT definitional twins. Marketing-platform deliverability is a different concern from transactional-platform deliverability, but the cross-channel kill-shot card surfaces whether marketing-side reputation is leaking into transactional-side delivery on the same sender domain.
- Klaviyo composite vs site customer-support ticket volume: useful operational reconciliation. Sustained composite-amber periods often correlate with elevated “I didn’t receive my email” or “I got duplicate emails” ticket volume; the cross-source view confirms the operational impact.