SMS Rev. / Recipient
What a text was worth per person it reached.
What it means
SMS Rev. / Recipient is the revenue Klaviyo attributes to your texts, divided by the number of people those texts went to. Recipients counts everyone the message reached, not the ones who tapped through. It's a per-head figure, so it puts a small targeted text and a whole-list send on the same scale. Email Rev. / RecipientEmail Rev. / RecipientWhat each contact is worth per send. is the same sum on the other channel, sitting on the same row of cards.
Show the math
Formula and a worked example
Attributed revenue is the money Klaviyo credits to your SMS sends — not every order placed while a text happened to be out.
Recipients is everyone the message went to, opened or ignored.
Worked example. A text goes to 8,000 subscribers and Klaviyo credits it with €4,800: 4,800 ÷ 8,000 = €0.60 a head. The same week an email to 40,000 earns €14,000 — €0.35 a head.
SMS was worth nearly twice as much per person. Email moved almost three times the money. Both are true, and you only get both by reading the per-head figure beside the euro total.
It answers the question
Was that text worth the attention it spent? A high figure means you asked the right people at the right moment; a low one means you used up a phone number and got little back.
Why it matters
Judged on totals, the biggest list always wins and you learn nothing. Judged per head, the message that actually worked rises to the top — which is the only way to tell a good text from a large one.
Your SMS list is also finite and slow to rebuild. Net SMS SubscribersNet SMS SubscribersReal growth of your text audience. is new sign-ups minus unsubscribes, so a send that earns little per head has still spent names you can't easily get back.
What good looks like
There's no published band. This is a euro figure and it moves with your price point and how tightly you segment, so a store with €200 baskets runs many times one with €25 baskets. Take the median across your sends for a quarter and treat that as your own line, then ask what the sends above it had in common.
Two comparisons are worth more than any absolute number: this figure against Email Rev. / Recipient on the same card row, and % SMS Revenue% SMS RevenueWhat texting contributes to your sales.8% or more is healthy, which does carry a benchmark because it's a share rather than an amount.
How to improve it
| Lever | What you do | Expect | How long | Watch out for |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Fast Stop texting the whole list | Send to profiles that clicked or bought in the last 90 days instead of every number you hold | Per-head value up sharply on the next send | 1–2 sends | Total SMS revenue can dip while you trade reach for efficiency, and dormant subscribers get no chance to wake up. |
| Fast Write for a small screen | One product, one link, one reason to act — instead of a summary of the whole range | Per-head value up on the same audience | 2 weeks | A single-product text has one chance to land, so the sends that miss earn nothing at all and your results get more volatile month to month. |
| Slow Move repeating sends into flows | Rebuild the texts you send on a schedule as triggers that fire at the moment of intent | Your best rows stop being one-offs | 4–8 weeks | Flows go stale quietly. Old copy and sold-out products keep sending long after anyone last checked them. |
| Slow Collect numbers worth having | Ask for the phone number at a point of real intent rather than with a blanket pop-up | New names that convert, so the per-head figure holds as the list grows | 1 quarter | The list grows more slowly, and your subscriber count looks worse for a quarter than a blanket capture would have made it look. |
Every lever costs something somewhere. The last column is the one to read twice.
Read it with
Value per head says whether a text worked. The channel's share of sales says whether it matters to the business. They move independently.
Working and growing
Each text is worth more and the channel carries more of the business. This is the only combination where sending more is clearly the right answer.
Sharper and smaller
You texted fewer people and earned more from each. Efficient, but the channel is contributing less to the business than it was.
Buying share with volume
SMS is carrying more sales because you're sending more, not because the sends got better. That trade works until the unsubscribes catch up with it.
The channel is fading
Fewer euros per person and a smaller slice of sales. Check what changed in your sending cadence before you change the copy.
The same maths on two channels, which is the comparison this row of cards exists for. SMS almost always wins per head and almost always loses on total money, because the lists are different sizes. Read them together and the question stops being which channel is better and becomes how many more numbers should we be collecting.
Quality per head next to what your own audience earned in total. A rising per-head figure with flat CRM Revenue means SMS got sharper without growing the owned business — you improved one send, not the channel.
Common misreads
The lists are different sizes, and per-head is a rate. The channel that earns more per person routinely earns far less in total. Read the euro figures beside these rates before moving budget.
It's a denominator problem more often than a copy problem. A blast to every number you've ever collected divides the same revenue across every dormant profile on the list. Segment first, then judge the writing.
Check the subscriber count beside it. Extracting more from a shrinking list looks identical to this for a quarter or two, and then there's nobody left to text.
Also called
SMS revenue per recipient · SMS RPR · revenue per text sent
See yoursYour SMS Rev. / Recipient for the period, next to the email figure and the share each channel earned.
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