Case study: a fabric store where email is 57% of store revenue

The store

A Shopify store selling fabric for quilting and dressmaking, much of it as pre-order “rounds”: a print collection is announced, customers order, the fabric is cut and shipped when the round closes. The list is small, under 10,000 profiles, and the customers are hobbyists who buy several times a year. The client is not named and the store’s revenue is not disclosed; the figures below are shares and rates from the client’s own reports.

What email does here

In the 12 months to October 2026, Klaviyo attributed 57.2% of store revenue to email. Month by month:

Month	Email share of store revenue	From flows
June 2026	52.7%	27%
July 2026	63.2%	27%
August 2026	55.2%	36%
September 2026	50.7%	40%

This store is the exception to the rule that flows make the money. Campaigns do 64% of email revenue here, because the product is the announcement: a new round opens, the email goes out, the community orders. Eight campaigns a month, one per drop or round milestone, and a campaign click rate of 2.33% across the year, three and a half times the benchmark median of 0.64%. Revenue per campaign recipient is $0.18, which sounds ordinary until you notice the store sends to the whole list and the list is almost entirely buyers.

Flows still matter. The welcome series, abandoned checkout and a “round closing soon” reminder earn $2.84 per recipient, well above the $1.07 median, because the intent is already there: a person who leaves a pre-order in the cart is a person who wanted that fabric.

What we changed

• List hygiene, twice a year. Unengaged profiles and anyone who had ever marked a send as spam were removed. On a small list this feels like losing customers; in practice the open rate went to 94% and deliverability complaints to zero, and the store’s emails land in the primary tab of the people who actually order.
• A renewed welcome popup so that new subscribers from a drop announcement on social enter a nurture sequence that explains how rounds work before the first purchase. The popup converts 2.6% of unique viewers, below the 4.7% median, and that is fine: the audience arrives from the community already knowing the brand.
• Campaign discipline. Every send is one fabric story. No “10 reasons to quilt this winter”. The audience wants to see the print and the closing date.

What did not work

A monthly “catalogue” email that showed everything in stock. It had the lowest click of any send in the year. The list responds to scarcity (a round closes) and novelty (a new print), not to breadth.

What to take from it

1. If your customers wait for your drops, email is your main channel, and campaigns beat flows. Send on every drop and on every round milestone.
2. Keep the list small and clean rather than big and quiet. A 94% open rate on 8,000 profiles earns more than 40% on 30,000.
3. Still build the three intent flows (welcome, abandoned checkout, closing-soon). They earn 2 to 3 times the benchmark per recipient because the intent is real.

The store is on our Pro retainer. The free 30-minute audit tells you whether your store is a flow store or a campaign store, and the plan is different for each.