Email & SMS Campaign ROI Calculator
See what one send is actually worth. Enter the rates from your campaign report and get revenue, profit, return on investment and cost per order — for email or SMS.
Email & SMS Campaign ROI Calculator
Work out what a single send is worth. Every rate below comes off your campaign report — pick a channel to start from typical figures, then replace them with your own.
Profit from this send
Profitable
$1,909.20
Updates as you type — nothing is sent anywhere.
The funnel this calculator walks
A send narrows at every step. Recipients become delivered messages once bounces and invalid numbers drop out. Delivered becomes opened. Opened becomes clicked. Clicked becomes ordered. Each step is a percentage of the step above it, not of the original list, which is the mistake that makes most back-of-envelope estimates come out several times too high. Multiply the four rates together and you get the share of your list that actually buys — with the default figures, about 0.16 percent of recipients, or roughly one order for every 630 people you send to.
Why profit is the headline and not ROI
ROI is a ratio, and ratios flatter small numbers. A send that costs five dollars and returns fifty is a 900 percent return, but it is still forty-five dollars. Profit tells you whether the send was worth the afternoon it took to build, and its sign is the decision: below zero the campaign cost more than it earned. The ROI figure sits directly underneath for when you need to compare one channel against another rather than judge a send on its own.
Where each rate lives in your reports
Klaviyo, Mailchimp, Omnisend and Shopify Email all show delivery, open and click rates on the campaign detail screen. Order rate is the one people fill in from memory, and it is worth looking up properly — most platforms report attributed orders per campaign, and dividing that by clicks gives the figure this calculator wants. Use one real send rather than a rolling average, because a promotion and a newsletter behave nothing alike.
Open rates are not what they were
Apple's Mail Privacy Protection pre-loads tracking pixels, which registers as an open whether or not anybody read the message. On a list with a large Apple Mail share, reported open rates run well above reality. If your open rate jumped in late 2021 and never came down, that is why. The practical fix is to work from clicks: set open rate to 100 percent and enter your click rate as a share of delivered instead. The arithmetic is identical and the inputs are ones you can trust.
SMS behaves differently on every line
SMS has no open tracking at all, so the SMS preset holds open rate at 100 percent and runs the funnel on clicks alone. Click rates are typically several times higher than email, delivery rates are slightly lower, and the cost is real and per-message rather than a flat platform fee. That last point matters most: an email send to a list you already own is close to free at the margin, while the same list on SMS carries a cost that scales with every recipient. A campaign that is comfortably profitable on email can lose money on SMS at the same conversion rate.
What one send does not tell you
This is a single-campaign figure. It ignores unsubscribes, which are a real cost paid in future sends rather than this one, and it ignores the orders that would have happened anyway — attributed revenue is not the same as incremental revenue. It also ignores the long tail, since some recipients buy days later through a different route entirely. Treat the output as the value of one send, and judge the channel on a quarter of them together.
Frequently asked questions
Is this campaign ROI calculator free?
Yes. It runs entirely in your browser, needs no signup, and nothing you enter is sent anywhere.
Should click rate be a share of opens or of delivered?
The calculator expects a share of opens. If your platform reports clicks against delivered instead, set open rate to 100 percent and enter that figure as the click rate — the result is the same.
What should I include in campaign cost?
The send cost plus what it took to produce: design and copy time, any paid creative, and the share of your monthly platform fee this send used. For SMS the per-message charge usually dominates everything else.
Why does ROI show 0% when I set campaign cost to zero?
Return on investment divides by the cost, so with no cost there is no ratio to report and the field falls back to zero. The profit figure above it is still correct, and it is the number to read in that case.
Are the default rates realistic?
They are typical ecommerce figures, not benchmarks to aim at, and they exist only so the calculator opens with something sensible in it. Replace every one of them with your own campaign report before drawing any conclusion.
Why is my open rate so much higher than my click rate suggests?
Apple Mail Privacy Protection loads tracking pixels automatically, registering opens nobody made. If a large share of your list uses Apple Mail, your reported open rate is inflated. Work from clicks instead by setting open rate to 100 percent.