Which Email and SMS Metrics Actually Matter?

Ask an Operator with 1r Agency

A new 1r series where we sit down with the specialists who run this work every day.

First up: Katherine Hans, Head of Lifecycle Marketing at 1r, who brings more than 10 years of experience building and optimizing email and SMS programs, including extensive agency-side work with clients across DTC verticals.

We've written before about why email and SMS underperform for most DTC brands. This time we wanted the operator's view: how Katherine actually diagnoses a program, which numbers she trusts, which she ignores, and where she'd tell a brand to start.

A lifecycle program can post strong open rates and still leave significant revenue on the table if customers aren't clicking, converting, or entering the right flows. The metrics that reveal that gap aren't always the ones brands are watching.

How can you tell if your email and SMS program is underperforming?

Start with benchmarks and core KPIs to understand how the program compares to other brands of a similar size and within the same industry. From there, look at the relationship between site traffic, conversions, and lifecycle-attributed revenue, and whether key flow triggers are capturing the volume of customers you would expect.

Those high-level indicators usually tell the story of where the biggest opportunities are. From there, you can go deeper into individual metrics: click rate, conversion rate, revenue per recipient, unsubscribe rate, flow performance, and deliverability.

The biggest mistake is looking at one metric in isolation. A program can have strong open rates and still be underperforming if customers aren't clicking or converting.

Which lifecycle metrics actually matter, and which are vanity?

Open rates have become unreliable over the last few years, especially with privacy changes like Apple Mail Privacy Protection, so they shouldn't be a major measure of success.

The metrics that matter are the ones that tell you whether you're changing customer behavior:

Click rate.
Are people engaging with what you send?

Conversion rate.
Is that engagement turning into purchases?

Average order value (AOV).
How much is each converted customer worth?

Revenue per recipient (RPR). The clearest single measure of whether a send earned its place in the inbox.

Unsubscribe rate and deliverability. Program health.
There's no point driving short-term revenue if it hurts the long-term health of the list.

At the end of the day, there are two questions: Are people engaging with what you're sending, and is that engagement turning into revenue or another meaningful action?

What's the first flow a brand should fix if they only have time to fix one?

Fix an abandonment flow first, whether that's Browse, Cart, or Checkout, but look at the data before deciding which one.

How much traffic is reaching each stage? How many people are triggering the flow every week? Where are you leaving the most potential revenue on the table?

Abandonment flows work because they're based on something the customer actually did. That makes them naturally more relevant and personalized, and they can become meaningful revenue drivers quickly. Once they're set up correctly, they don't require much ongoing work. You make the initial investment, optimize over time, and let them run in the background.

How often should a DTC brand actually be emailing?

There isn't a one-size-fits-all cadence. It depends on the size of the brand, list size, how engaged the audience is, how often you've historically been sending, and what you're selling.

As a general starting point, two marketing emails per week can be a healthy cadence for many DTC brands, particularly when paired with thoughtful segmentation. Start somewhere manageable, test a lot, look at the data, and ramp up from there. The goal is the balance between consistency and oversaturation.

But the more important question isn't "How many emails should we send?" It's "Are we sending the right message to the right customer at the right time?" As you increase frequency, watch unsubscribe rates, engagement, conversion, and deliverability closely to make sure additional sends are creating incremental value rather than audience fatigue.

Where do most brands go wrong with segmentation?

The biggest mistake is trying to reach as many people as possible with every message, on the assumption that more recipients automatically means more revenue.

In reality, a healthy lifecycle program requires smart sending, not more sending. Excluding unengaged customers protects deliverability and keeps your active audience healthier over time.

Segmentation should also go beyond basic demographics. Think about spend thresholds, product affinity, purchase frequency, buying history, engagement level, and customer lifecycle stage. A loyal repeat customer shouldn't receive the same message as someone who subscribed yesterday. The more you understand where someone is in their relationship with the brand, the more relevant and effective the messaging becomes.

How should acquisition and retention work together?

Acquisition and retention aren't separate functions. They're two sides of the same customer journey, and the paid media team and the lifecycle team running email and SMS should operate as one. Acquisition gets someone through the door; retention determines how much value you ultimately get from that customer.

The first purchase is where that starts. Whatever message, product, or offer convinced someone to buy should carry through into the post-purchase and lifecycle experience. The two teams should constantly share learnings. Paid can tell lifecycle which products and messages drive acquisition, and lifecycle can tell paid which customers become high-value repeat purchasers.

The goal shouldn't be cheap acquisition. It should be acquiring customers who are valuable over time. Strong retention makes acquisition more efficient because you get more from every acquisition dollar. Ideally, the customer never feels a handoff. They just feel like the brand understands where they are in their journey.

What does a healthy lifecycle program look like at 6 months versus 18 months?

At six months, you want a strong foundation: core flows built and functioning, acquisition consistently growing the list, key triggers and integrations working, and a close eye on deliverability and program health. This stage is about infrastructure, and about making sure you're not building on a shaky base.

By 18 months, the program should be far more sophisticated: a strong A/B testing framework, a clear library of learnings, and a repeatable process for applying them month after month. Segmentation and personalization should be much more advanced. Instead of one generic Abandoned Cart flow, you might run different experiences based on cart value, product category, customer status, or purchase history.

The progression is to build the foundation, learn what works, then use those learnings to create a more personalized and sophisticated program.

Can you walk through a time you turned around an underperforming program?

Many times, some of the fastest wins have had nothing to do with creative. They've been technical.

Triggers set up incorrectly, timing that doesn't make sense, profile filters that accidentally prevent customers from ever entering a flow. Sometimes you spend weeks talking about strategy when the real problem is that the flow isn't reaching the people it's supposed to reach.

One example that sticks with me was a Winback flow that hadn't filtered a single person into the series in six months. There were so many overlapping filters that they were eliminating 100% of the eligible audience. We fixed the logic, and within 48 hours revenue started coming through.

Another time, I set up a simple two-touch Abandoned Cart flow for a brand that hadn't had one turned on. Within seven days, it generated more than $12,000 in recovered-cart revenue and became the highest-revenue-generating flow in the entire program.

Those wins are a good reminder that you don't have to blow up the whole program to make a big impact. Sometimes you find the thing that's broken and fix it.

This kind of behavioral, flow-first lifecycle work runs across our client roster, from luxury wine at Silver Oak to fragrance at Maison Louis Marie to design and hospitality at Roman & Williams. The channels differ, but the principle is the same: build around what the customer actually does.

How is AI changing lifecycle marketing right now?

The brands that embrace AI thoughtfully will have a real advantage. AI isn't replacing marketers; it's a resource that elevates what we already do and lets us work more strategically.

The area I'm most excited about is performance analysis. AI can sift through campaign, flow, customer, and engagement data far faster than a person can manually, which means less time pulling reports and more time figuring out what the data is telling us and what to do about it. It's also useful for brainstorming, personalization, segmentation, A/B testing, and content development.

But the human part doesn't go away. AI gets you to the answer faster, but you still need someone who understands the brand, the customer, and the business goals, and who can judge whether a recommendation actually makes sense. That's where it's most valuable: it takes the manual work off our plate so we can spend more time being a thoughtful, proactive partner and less time being data analysts.

Where 1r comes in

If any of this sounds like your program, that's what our lifecycle team does. As a Klaviyo Platinum Partner, we audit your flows, segmentation, deliverability, and program health, then build the sequenced plan to fix what's underperforming first.

Heading into BFCM? Start here: How many of these 5 pre-BFCM mistakes are you making? It's the short self-audit checklist we run before every peak season, covering the five gaps we find in almost every email and SMS audit. Delivered to your inbox in minutes.

Prefer to talk it through? Reach us at hello@1r.agency.