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).
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):
Five observations:
- 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: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.
Cross-connector reconciliation:
This card IS the cross-connector view. The relevant comparisons are:
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.