Yield (email)
Revenue or conversions produced per email sent — the unifying business metric across all email programs.
Yield is the business outcome (revenue, conversions, qualified leads, demos booked) produced per email sent, typically expressed in dollars or actions per thousand sends. Yield unifies all the intermediate metrics (open rate, click rate, conversion rate) into a single number that connects email program performance to business value.
For e-commerce, yield is typically expressed as revenue per 1,000 emails sent. Industry benchmarks: $25-50 RPM for cold prospect lists, $50-200 RPM for active subscribers, $200-1,000+ RPM for VIP segments. For B2B, yield is usually expressed in qualified leads or pipeline dollars per 1,000 sends. For media businesses, yield is often ad revenue per send.
The discipline of measuring yield prevents the trap of optimizing intermediate metrics that don't matter. A subject line that increases open rate by 10% but decreases conversion by 15% is bad for yield. A welcome series that has lower open rate than the newsletter but 4x the conversion rate is a yield winner. Always measure to revenue when possible; when not, measure to the action closest to revenue you can track.