The Phoenix

The Metrics

• $15.8M total email revenue across 31 months (Jan 2022 — Jul 2024)
• $11.7M in 2022 — the scale-up year
• $1.64M in a single month — November 2022, peak performance
• 50.45% of store revenue from email in Nov 2022
• 47.61% of store revenue from email in Jul 2024 — still dominant two and a half years in
• 15–20+ automated flows generating $100K–$210K/month on autopilot
• 39.54% open rate post-cleanup (May 2023)
• 30–47% email attribution sustained through 2023–2024

Before: Email Was an Afterthought

This is the most complete email marketing case study we've ever published. Not because the numbers are big — they are — but because the story has everything. The explosive growth. The near-disaster. The recovery. And ultimately, the proof that email isn't just "another channel." It can be the channel.

When we started working with The Phoenix in January 2022, email was driving about 14–19% of total store revenue. For a health and wellness brand doing serious volume, that's... fine. It's not terrible. But it's leaving millions on the table.

Here's what we walked into:

The flows were basic. A welcome series. Maybe a cart abandonment sequence. The default templates that come pre-built when you set up Klaviyo. Nothing custom. Nothing strategic. Default flows doing default things. (If you're wondering what a properly built email and SMS marketing operation looks like, keep reading.)

Segmentation barely existed. Campaigns went to the full list. Same message to the person who bought yesterday and the person who hadn't opened anything in six months. That's not email marketing. That's email blasting. There's a massive difference.

The list was growing, but engagement wasn't. More subscribers sounds great on paper. But when your list grows faster than your engagement, you're diluting your sender reputation with every send. And inbox providers notice.

Spam complaints were already a problem. In January 2022, the brand had 364 spam complaints. That might not sound like a lot. But spam complaints compound. Every one tells Gmail, Yahoo, and Outlook that your emails aren't wanted. Stack up enough and your emails stop reaching inboxes entirely. Full stop.

The Phoenix had a massive opportunity sitting right in front of them. Big list. Great product. Loyal customers. They just didn't have the email infrastructure to capitalize on any of it.

That's where we came in. As a Klaviyo Gold Partner agency, we knew exactly what levers to pull.

The Scale-Up: January Through November 2022

We didn't ease into this. From month one, we were building and launching simultaneously.

January 2022 was the baseline. We sent campaigns to about 911,000 recipients and generated $389K in campaign revenue. Flow revenue: $272K. Total email revenue: ~$661K. Email was about 17% of the store's total.

Good starting point. We knew there was way more in there.

The first move: rebuilt the flow architecture

We didn't tweak the existing welcome series and call it a day. We built 15–20 automated flows from scratch:

Welcome series. Browse abandonment. Cart abandonment. Post-purchase sequences. Win-back. VIP nurture. Sunset. Cross-sell. Replenishment reminders. Each one built with proper segmentation, dynamic content, and send timing based on actual subscriber behavior.

This is the part most brands underestimate. Flows are revenue that happens while you sleep. Once built and optimized, they generate income every day without anyone touching them. By mid-2022, the flows were consistently pulling $150K–$250K per month. In July 2022 alone, flow click rates hit 16% — actual humans actively clicking through and buying from automated emails.

The second move: scaled campaigns aggressively

Not just "send more emails." We expanded the list strategically while testing subject lines, send times, content formats, and segmentation. We went from 911K recipients in January to over 12 million by November.

Yes. 12 million.

Before you assume that's "blast everyone and pray" — understand what was happening underneath. We were testing constantly. Which segments respond to which offers. What time of day drives the highest revenue per send. Which subject line structures earn the open. Every campaign was building a data set. Every send taught us something we used on the next one.

The trajectory:

Look at that November number. $1.24M in campaign revenue. $401K in flow revenue. $1.65M total email revenue in a single month. Not a fluke. Eleven months of building, testing, and optimizing converging on the biggest sales event of the year.

BFCM 2022: The $1.6 Million Month

November 2022 deserves its own section, because it was — and I'm not exaggerating — one of the most impressive email marketing months I've ever been part of.

$1,646,759 in total email revenue.

50.45% of the store's entire revenue came from email.

Let that sit. Half the store's revenue that month was driven by the email program we built. Not paid ads. Not organic. Not social. Email.

October was the warm-up

You can't go from normal volume to BFCM volume overnight. Inbox providers will throttle you or flag you as spam. So we spent October gradually increasing send frequency. We ran early-access campaigns for VIPs. We launched teaser content. We built anticipation in the list while warming up the sending infrastructure.

October email revenue was solid — north of $600K. But that wasn't the point. October existed to make November possible.

November was execution

The full playbook, dialed in:

• VIPs got early access 48 hours before the general list
• Countdown sequences building urgency across the week
• Cart recovery firing fast with segment-specific offers
• Browse abandonment catching people who looked but didn't add to cart
• Re-engagement campaigns hitting lapsed subscribers with a "last chance" angle
• Every campaign segmented by engagement, purchase history, and product interest

The result wasn't one good day. It was a full month of sustained performance. Campaigns: $1.24M. Flows: $401K.

December didn't drop off a cliff either

Most brands go quiet after BFCM. We didn't. Win-back hit non-purchasers with a different angle. Buyers got thank-you sequences with replenishment reminders and cross-sells. December still pulled strong numbers because we kept the machine running.

2022 full year: ~$11.7M in email revenue. ~$8.7M from campaigns. ~$2.9M from flows. One year.

The Cleanup: When 11,000 Spam Complaints Hit in a Single Month

Here's the part most agencies leave out. We're not going to, because what happened in early 2023 — and how we handled it — is actually the most important part of this whole story.

When you scale from 911K to 12M recipients in eleven months, you accumulate dead weight. Unengaged subscribers. People who signed up for a coupon and never opened another email. Spam traps. Dormant addresses.

In January 2023, spam complaints spiked to 11,392 in a single month.

That's not a typo. Eleven thousand three hundred and ninety-two people hit the spam button.

Context matters. When you're sending to millions, even a tiny percentage of complaints is a big absolute number. But inbox providers don't care about your percentages. They see absolute volume. When Gmail sees thousands of spam complaints from your domain in a month, they start routing your emails to spam for everyone. Including the people who actually want them.

This was a deliverability crisis. Ignoring it or trying to push through would've destroyed the channel.

So we did what most agencies are afraid to do: we cut the list. Hard.

Step 1 — Sunset the unengaged

Anyone who hadn't opened or clicked in the last 90 days got removed from active sending. Painful. Our sendable list shrank dramatically. But sending to people who don't engage actively hurts everyone else.

Step 2 — Clean the data

Validation tools across the entire list. Removed hard bounces, spam traps, role-based addresses, and disposable emails. These are the silent killers of deliverability — they don't just not buy, they actively damage your sender score.

Step 3 — Rebuild sender reputation

For several weeks, we only sent to the most engaged segments. Small batches. High opens. High clicks. This tells inbox providers, "Hey, the people we're emailing actually want our emails." Email equivalent of rehab.

Step 4 — Implement hygiene going forward

Automatic sunset flows for the unengaged. Double opt-in on high-risk signup sources. Monthly list cleaning. We weren't letting this happen again.

The results were immediate

Open rates jumped. Before cleanup we were in the low-to-mid 20s. By May 2023, average open rate hit 39.54%. Nearly 40% of recipients actually opening the email. Which means more eyes on the offer. Which means more revenue per send.

Was 2023 revenue lower than 2022? Yes. Total email revenue for 2023 came in around $7.3M — about $5M campaigns + $2.3M flows. A decline from 2022's $11.7M.

Here's what most people miss: revenue per subscriber went UP. We were sending to fewer people and making more money per person. The list was healthier. The engagement was real. The foundation we rebuilt would sustain performance for the next year and a half.

Cutting a list is scary. Watching your sendable audience shrink by hundreds of thousands feels wrong. But the alternative — watching the entire email channel slowly die from deliverability issues — is way worse. Short-term pain for long-term gain. It worked.

The Optimization Phase: 2023 Through Mid-2024

After the cleanup, we entered a different mode. The scale-up phase was about growth. The optimization phase was about efficiency and profitability.

Fewer recipients. Better targeting. Higher conversion.

Instead of blasting 12 million, we focused on sending the right message to the right segment at the right time. Campaigns went to engaged subscribers who'd shown buying intent. Flows were refined based on eighteen months of performance data — we knew which emails in each sequence performed, where people dropped off, and which ones drove the most revenue.

The numbers:

Look at that last line. July 2024: 47.61% of the store's total revenue came from email. Nearly half.

That's not a BFCM month. Not a big sale event. A regular July. And email was generating almost half the store's income. That's what a mature, well-built email program looks like.

The beauty of this phase was that it was low-drama. No crises. No massive pivots. Just steady, consistent optimization:

• A/B testing subject lines every week
• Refining flow timing based on conversion data
• Updating creative and copy to prevent fatigue
• Expanding product recommendation logic in flows
• Testing new segments we hadn't explored yet
• Monitoring deliverability daily to catch problems early

This is the boring part. It's also the most profitable part. Because compounding small improvements over months and months adds up to massive results.

The Flow Architecture: Revenue That Runs Itself

Let me spend a minute on flows specifically, because this is where most brands leave the biggest pile of money on the table.

A flow is an automated email sequence triggered by subscriber behavior. Someone abandons a cart → flow triggers. Someone browses a product but doesn't buy → flow triggers. Someone makes their first purchase → flow triggers. They run 24/7, 365 days a year, without anyone pressing send.

For The Phoenix, we built and maintained 15–20 active flows throughout the engagement:

• Welcome Series — first emails new subscribers receive. Sets expectations, delivers the signup incentive, introduces the brand story, moves toward that first purchase. Catches people at peak interest.
• Cart Abandonment — the bread and butter. Multiple emails, each with a different angle: reminder, social proof, urgency, occasionally a small incentive for high-value carts.
• Browse Abandonment — catches people earlier. They looked but didn't add to cart. Softer sell. "Still thinking about this?" with imagery and reviews.
• Post-Purchase — thank you, confirmation, shipping updates, then transitions into product education, usage tips, cross-sells based on what they bought.
• Win-Back — for customers who haven't purchased in 60, 90, or 120 days. Graduated urgency. Different offers at each stage.
• VIP Nurture — top customers get treated differently. Early access. Exclusive offers. Content that reinforces the relationship. Your most profitable segment — treat them that way.
• Sunset Flow — the unengaged get a final "still want to hear from us?" If they don't re-engage, they're removed. Protects deliverability for everyone else.
• Replenishment Reminders — for consumables (which health and wellness brands are full of), timed by average product lifespan. "Running low? Reorder before you run out."
• Cross-Sell + Upsell — post-purchase sequences recommending complementary products based on history.

Combined output: $100K–$400K per month in automated revenue. Every month. Without anyone hitting send.

Peak flow month was November 2022 at $401K. Even quieter months — mid-summer, post-holiday — flows consistently generated $100K–$210K. That's the power of automation done right. It doesn't take vacations.

The Full Numbers: 31 Months of Data

2022 — The Scale-Up

2023 — The Cleanup and Rebuild

2024 (Jan – Jul) — The Optimization

Grand Total

What This Proves

This case study isn't about big numbers for the sake of it. It's about what happens when you treat email as a real revenue channel instead of an afterthought.

Email can drive 30–50% of total store revenue. Not 10%. Not 15%. When it's built right, email becomes your single most profitable channel — higher margins than paid ads, more predictable than SEO, and it compounds over time.

Aggressive scaling works — but only if you manage deliverability. We scaled from 911K to 12M recipients and drove $11.7M in email revenue in year one. The spam complaints that came with that growth nearly killed the channel. Growth without deliverability management is a ticking time bomb.

Cutting your list can be the most profitable decision you make. When we slashed the list in early 2023, revenue per subscriber went up, open rates nearly doubled, and email attribution held at 30–47% of total revenue. Smaller list, better results. Every time.

Flows are the foundation. $6.2M in automated flow revenue over 31 months. Revenue that generated itself while we focused on optimizing campaigns. If you're not running at least 10–15 properly built flows, you're leaving six figures on the table every month.

The compounding effect is real. Month one was $661K. By month eleven we hit $1.64M. Even after the cleanup and scale-down, we sustained $400K–$550K per month through 2024. Each optimization, each test, each refined segment stacks on the last.

This isn't theory. Real dollars. Real Klaviyo data. Real campaigns and flows sent to real people over 31 months. $15.8M worth of proof that email marketing, done right, is the most undervalued channel in eCommerce.

(And email was only one piece of the puzzle — see how we managed $23M+ in paid media spend for the same brand.)

Related Case Studies

• The Phoenix Paid Media: 3x Revenue on $23M Ad Spend — The other half of The Phoenix story. How we managed their entire paid media operation across Google and Meta.
• If It Barks: 24x ROI and Tripled Email Revenue in 2 Months — Another eCommerce brand where we rebuilt the email program from scratch and saw explosive results.
• TheLiquorStore.com: 296.9% YoY Revenue Growth — How segmentation and quarterly planning turned a "dead quarter" into the best one on record.

Your Email Channel Is Probably Leaving Money on the Table

Most eCommerce brands run 3–5 basic flows, send campaigns to their full list, and call it an email strategy. It's not. It's the default. And the default leaves 60–70% of your email revenue unrealized.

If you're doing $1M+ in annual revenue and email is less than 25% of your total store — there's a gap. A big one. We know exactly how to close it because we've done it before. $15.8 million times over.

We'll look at your Klaviyo account, walk through the numbers with you, and show you specifically where the revenue is hiding. No pitch deck. No generic recommendations. Just your data, our experience, and an honest conversation about what's possible.

Book a call with Mark