Open rate is theater. RPR is the truth.

Happy Wednesday!

Two flows on the same account, both sitting at a 30 percent open rate. One earned $4 per recipient last month, the other earned 30 cents. The Klaviyo dashboard shows them as equally healthy.

They are not even in the same universe. One of them deserves more traffic, the other deserves to be killed. The number that tells you which is which is RPR.

Revenue per recipient. Flow revenue divided by everyone who entered the flow in the window. It is the closest thing to truth Klaviyo will give you, and most flow reviews never bother to compute it.

Open rate tells you a subject line worked, click rate tells you a hero image worked, and total flow revenue tells you the flow is alive. None of those tell you what a flow earns per person who walks into it. RPR does.

But RPR will lie to you in four specific ways, and if you read it without the caveats you will end up optimizing the wrong flows.

Outliers. RPR is a mean. One $3,000 purchase in a niche flow with 200 recipients pushes RPR to $15 before anyone else converts. On any flow under a thousand recipients, you have to read RPR with a median sitting next to it.

Attribution window. Klaviyo defaults to 5-day click attribution. Stretch the window to 30 days and your RPR shifts substantially overnight, with no actual change in the flow. Any agency reporting RPR without disclosing the window is not telling you what you think they are telling you.

Same RPR, opposite mechanics. This is the hardest one to see. Two flows can land at the same RPR through completely opposite math: a 1 percent purchase rate with $400 AOV looks identical to a 4 percent purchase rate with $100 AOV. The first is leaking high-intent buyers, the second is converting low-intent traffic, and they need opposite fixes.

Sample size. RPR on a flow with under a few hundred entries in the window is noise dressed up as a number. Without a minimum-N threshold, you are tuning to randomness and calling it strategy.

How I actually read it

The way I read RPR is as four numbers at once: mean, median, AOV, and sample size. I rank flows by RPR first to find what is pulling weight, then I drop into the AOV versus purchase-rate split to figure out which fix the flow actually needs.

RPR ranks, it does not kill on its own. A sunset flow or a deep-sequence win-back can sit at low RPR and still earn its place doing list hygiene or re-engagement. The flow's job decides what to do with the number.

If you want me to pull RPR on your account and tell you which flows are quietly bleeding revenue, book a time below and we'll look at it together.

Stop reporting open rate as a flow health indicator. RPR is the floor, not the ceiling.

Go check your flows before you trust your dashboard.

- Raymond