Healthy DTC ranges 20-30%. Below 15% = email under-leveraged; above 40% = paid-acq atrophy risk.
At a glance
The single most important Klaviyo health number for merchants who also have a commerce platform connected. Computed as klv_total_revenue ÷ commerce_platform.total_revenue × 100. Healthy DTC ranges 20-30%; below 15% means email is under-leveraged; above 40% means paid acquisition has atrophied (or attribution is over-claiming). This card requires both a Klaviyo connector AND a commerce-platform connector (Shopify, BigCommerce, or Adobe Commerce).
| What it counts | klv_total_revenue ÷ commerce_platform.total_revenue × 100. Numerator from POST /api/campaign-values-reports + POST /api/flow-values-reports; denominator from the connected commerce platform’s order index. |
| API endpoint + statistics field | Numerator: Klaviyo’s revenue aggregated server-side. Denominator: Shopify Order.totalPrice, BigCommerce total_inc_tax, or Adobe Commerce grand_total. Computed locally in Vortex IQ. |
| Attribution model (numerator) | Klaviyo default: 5-day click + 1-day view. Email or SMS touch within the window claims credit. Single-touch (last-touch). |
| Attribution model (denominator) | None. The commerce-platform total_revenue includes ALL revenue regardless of channel (organic, paid, email, social, direct). |
| Cross-channel attribution semantics | Klaviyo only sees its own touches. So the numerator is “what Klaviyo claims it influenced”, not “what only happened because of email”. The denominator is the entire pie. The ratio is “share of revenue Klaviyo claims credit for”. This is why the ratio is meaningful directionally but not as a clean incrementality measure. |
| Single-touch shape | Same order can only count once in the numerator. If a customer received a Klaviyo email AND clicked a Google Ad before purchasing, Klaviyo claims credit if its touch was within the 5-day window AND was last. So the email-share figure tracks Klaviyo’s position in the click chain, not its raw effectiveness. |
| Email vs SMS aggregation | Combined in the numerator. Both email and SMS Klaviyo revenue are pulled. To split, see channel filter in Klaviyo’s dashboard. |
| MPP impact | None on revenue; opens are noisy but revenue is clean. |
| Refunds / cancellations | NOT deducted on either side. Both numerator and denominator are gross-of-refund. So the ratio is internally consistent but slightly inflated for both. |
| Currency | Same currency on both sides if the merchant has set up Klaviyo with the same base currency as the commerce platform (typical). Multi-currency stores see one consistent figure because Klaviyo normalises to base. |
| Page cap (numerator) | 50 campaigns + 50 flows. Mature accounts may see slight numerator truncation. The ratio errs slightly low for very large senders. |
| Time window | 30D vsP |
| Alert trigger | <15% (email under-leveraged). The implicit upper warning band is >40% (other channels weakening, not Klaviyo improving). |
| Roles | owner, marketing, finance |
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 skincare brand running on Shopify with Klaviyo for email + SMS. Reading the dashboard on 14 Apr 26 for the trailing 30 days (14 Mar 26 to 12 Apr 26):| Source | 30D revenue |
|---|---|
| Shopify Total Revenue (all channels combined) | £412,600 |
| Klaviyo Email-Attributed Revenue (campaigns) | £43,200 |
| Klaviyo Email-Attributed Revenue (flows) | £30,200 |
| Klaviyo Total Email + SMS revenue | £73,400 |
| Period | Email share | Klaviyo absolute | Shopify absolute |
|---|---|---|---|
| Trailing 30D (this window) | 17.8% | £73,400 | £412,600 |
| Prior 30D | 14.2% | £58,300 | £410,100 |
| Year-ago 30D | 21.5% | £61,400 | £285,600 |
- 17.8% sits in the middle of the healthy 20-30% band, just below it. Up from 14.2% the prior month, which would have triggered the under-leveraged alert. The merchant ran a heavier Klaviyo cadence in April (Mother’s Day prep). The right reading is “email is doing its job and growing faster than the store overall this month”.
- The year-ago figure of 21.5% on a smaller revenue base shows the store outgrew email. A year ago Klaviyo did £61,400 on a £285,600 store; this year £73,400 on a £412,600 store. Klaviyo grew 19.5% absolute; the store grew 44%. Email share fell from 21.5% to 17.8% not because Klaviyo got worse but because paid acquisition got better. This is the most common pattern as DTC brands scale.
- If the share fell to 11% next month, two interpretations are possible. Either (a) Klaviyo absolute revenue dropped (deliverability problem, list degraded, key flow turned off, reputation damage); or (b) the store grew massively from a non-email channel (viral moment, paid-acquisition campaign succeeded, PR drop). Always read absolute alongside the ratio. The absolute number tells you which.
- If the share rose to 35%+ for two months, that’s a yellow flag, not a green one. It usually means non-Klaviyo channels weakened, paid ads became inefficient, organic traffic dropped, social declined. The absolute Klaviyo revenue often hasn’t moved much; the share rose because the denominator shrank. Do not celebrate a rising share without checking commerce-platform total revenue.
- Last-touch attribution makes the share fragile under marketing-mix changes. If the merchant pauses Google Ads for a week, customers who would have bought after a Google Ad click now buy after a Klaviyo email click instead, the email share rises mechanically. This is real revenue, but it’s not “Klaviyo got more effective”; it’s “Klaviyo became the visible last touch for revenue that was already coming”. The right benchmark for Klaviyo health is absolute revenue and per-recipient efficiency, not share alone.
Sibling cards merchants should reference together
Email Share is a portfolio metric. Pair it with these:| Card | Why pair it with Email Share |
|---|---|
| Klaviyo Email-Attributed Revenue | The numerator. Always read absolute alongside ratio, otherwise a falling share looks like a Klaviyo problem when really the store grew. |
| Shopify Total Revenue | The denominator (when on Shopify). Required to interpret share movements. |
| BigCommerce Total Revenue | The denominator (when on BigCommerce). |
| Adobe Commerce Total Revenue | The denominator (when on Adobe Commerce). |
| Klaviyo Flow vs Campaign Revenue Mix | The shape inside the numerator. A 25% share with 60% flow share is more durable than a 25% share with 90% campaign share, the latter is one bad cadence week from collapsing. |
| Klaviyo Revenue per Recipient | The efficiency view. A high share built on high revenue-per-recipient is healthy; a high share built on heavy send volume is fragile. |
| GA4 Email Channel Revenue | The triangulation. GA4’s email channel revenue should be 60-80% of Klaviyo’s claimed revenue (Klaviyo’s longer attribution window claims more). Big gaps suggest UTM hygiene problems. |
| Klaviyo Abandoned-Cart Recovery Value | The single highest-leverage lever for raising the email share. Activating a draft abandoned-cart flow typically lifts share by 3-5 percentage points within 30 days. |
Reconciling against the vendor’s own dashboard
Where to look in Klaviyo: Klaviyo doesn’t expose this exact ratio; it’s a derived cross-connector metric only available when both Klaviyo and a commerce platform are connected. The closest views:- Klaviyo → Analytics → Performance, shows Klaviyo’s claimed revenue.
- Shopify Admin → Analytics → Reports → “Sales by traffic referrer”, shows Shopify’s view of email-attributed revenue (different attribution model, will not match).
- Klaviyo’s manual percentage tile (some accounts have configured this in custom reports), but that uses Klaviyo’s view of total revenue, not the commerce platform’s.
| Reason | Direction of divergence |
|---|---|
| Time-zone. Numerator (Klaviyo) and denominator (Shopify/BC/Adobe) may run on different timezones. UTC for Vortex IQ; account timezone for Klaviyo; store timezone for the commerce platform. Boundary-day mismatches can shift the ratio by 0.5-1 percentage point. | Either direction. |
| Refunds. Both numerator and denominator are gross-of-refund, so the ratio is internally consistent. But for a “true net” view both sides need to subtract refunds; usually the impact is similar (~5-15% reduction on each side) and the ratio is stable. | None on the ratio. |
| Page caps (numerator). 50 campaigns + 50 flows. Mature accounts may see slight numerator truncation. | Reported share runs slightly low for very large senders. |
| Klaviyo’s PLACED_ORDER attribution. The 5-day click + 1-day view window. If the merchant changed the window mid-period, historical share figures may differ from live. | Drift on changed-window accounts. |
| Multi-currency mismatch. If Klaviyo is set up with a different base currency than the commerce platform (rare), the ratio is meaningless. Always confirm both sides use the same base currency. | Critical if mismatched; usually flagged at connector setup. |
Sales channels in commerce platform. Shopify includes POS, marketplace, B2B, wholesale orders in Order.totalPrice. Klaviyo only tracks email-driven Shopify online-store orders. So a B2B-heavy or POS-heavy store will see lower email share than a pure online DTC store. | Reported share runs lower for multi-channel stores. |
| Card | Expected relationship | What causes legitimate divergence |
|---|---|---|
shopify.total_revenue | The denominator. The card is meaningless without it. | n/a |
bigcommerce.total_revenue | Same shape on BC. | n/a |
adobe_commerce.total_revenue | Same shape on Adobe Commerce. | n/a |
ga4.ga_revenue_trend (Email channel slice) | GA4’s email channel slice should run 60-80% of Klaviyo’s claimed revenue (because GA4 uses last-non-direct click vs Klaviyo’s 5-day click + 1-day view). Both divided by GA4 total or Klaviyo+commerce total give similar shares. | Bigger gaps usually mean UTM-tag hygiene problems on Klaviyo links. |
| Shopify “Klaviyo channel” revenue | Shopify’s own attribution view of Klaviyo. Will be smaller than this card’s numerator because Shopify uses its own (stricter) cookie-based attribution. | Shopify’s view is conservative; Klaviyo’s is liberal. |
Known limitations / merchant FAQs
Why is Klaviyo claiming such a high share, surely my Google Ads matter more? Klaviyo’s last-touch attribution gives email full credit for any conversion within 5 days of a click. If a customer clicked a Google Ad, then clicked a Klaviyo email three days later, then placed an order, Klaviyo claims it. All email platforms work this way, it’s not Klaviyo being aggressive. The right way to read this card is “what fraction of conversions had Klaviyo touches at the bottom of the funnel”, not “what would have been lost without email”. For a true incremental view, run a holdout test (suppress 10% of subscribers from email for 30 days, compare conversion rate of the holdout to the active group). My share is 8%, what should I do first? Three checks: (a) is the abandoned-cart flow live? Activating it typically lifts share by 3-5 points; (b) is the welcome flow live and 4-6 messages? Activating it typically lifts share by 1-2 points; (c) is send cadence below 1 campaign per week? Increasing to 2-3 campaigns per week to engaged segments typically lifts share by 2-4 points within 60 days. The share at 8% almost always means under-automation, not deliverability problems. My share is 45%, is that bad? Not necessarily, but worth investigating. Checkshopify.total_revenue (or BC/Adobe equivalent) for the prior 90 days. If commerce-platform revenue dropped while Klaviyo absolute revenue stayed flat or grew, your other channels weakened. Common causes: paid-ad performance dropped (CPMs rose, creative fatigue), organic search dropped (SEO penalty, algorithm change), social referral dropped (platform algorithm change). The share is high not because email got better but because the rest got worse.
Why is the share different from what Shopify’s “Klaviyo channel” tile shows?
Shopify uses its own attribution model: cookie-based, last-non-direct click, with shorter cookie windows. Klaviyo uses 5-day click + 1-day view. Klaviyo’s view is wider so it claims more. Pick one and stick with it. Don’t toggle between Shopify’s view and Klaviyo’s view, you’ll always see different numbers and lose confidence in both. We recommend Klaviyo’s view for email channel reporting and Shopify’s view for total revenue reporting; this card uses both consistently.
My multi-currency Shopify store, does this work?
Yes if Klaviyo’s base currency matches Shopify’s. Confirm in Klaviyo Account Settings → Currency. If they match (typical), Klaviyo normalises multi-currency Shopify orders to the base currency at order time, and Vortex IQ shows the ratio in that base currency. If they don’t match (rare misconfiguration), the ratio is meaningless. Reach out to Vortex IQ support to flag.
Does this include B2B orders, POS, marketplace?
The denominator (commerce-platform total) includes everything: online store, POS, B2B, marketplace, wholesale, all sales channels in the commerce platform. The numerator (Klaviyo) only includes online-store email-attributed orders. So a B2B-heavy or POS-heavy store will see a lower share than a pure DTC store. This is mathematically correct but worth understanding when benchmarking against industry figures (which usually assume pure online DTC).
The share dropped from 25% to 18% but my Klaviyo revenue is steady, what’s going on?
The store grew faster than Klaviyo. Compare commerce-platform total revenue this period vs prior; if it’s up 30%+ while Klaviyo is flat, you scaled non-email channels (paid acquisition, organic, partnerships, retail). The share fell because the denominator grew. This is usually a good thing, it means the merchant added growth without becoming more email-dependent. The fix (if any) is to grow Klaviyo to keep pace, not to slow down the other channels.
My SMS sends are big, does that inflate this share?
Yes. The numerator includes both email and SMS. SMS revenue-per-recipient is typically 2-3× email’s, so SMS-heavy accounts will see a higher share. Some agencies prefer to report email-only share by toggling SMS out in Klaviyo’s dashboard, but this card mixes them. To split, manually compute using klv_total_revenue minus the SMS slice from Klaviyo’s channel filter view.
Refunds, what’s the impact?
Both numerator and denominator are gross-of-refund. Refunds typically affect both sides similarly (5-15%), so the ratio is largely stable. For a true net view, subtract the store’s refund rate from each side; usually the share moves <1 percentage point.
Why does the alert fire below 15% but there’s no upper alert?
Below 15% is unambiguously under-leveraged for a DTC merchant of any size; the action (activate flows, raise cadence) is clear. Above 40% has multiple valid interpretations (genuinely email-strong, other channels weakening, attribution over-claim) so a hard alert would create noise. The dashboard tile colour reaches yellow above 40% as visual cue but doesn’t fire an audit.