363: How To Make Email Your #1 Revenue Source With Chase Dimond

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An ecommerce email marketing strategy should drive 20% to 30% of total revenue, and getting there means finding your maximum send frequency by testing upward until engagement degrades, then using segmentation to send more often without any individual receiving every email. Chase Dimond’s clients have generated over $50 million in attributable email revenue this way.

In this episode I sat down with Chase Dimond, co-founder of Boundless Labs, an email agency working with roughly 50 ecommerce brands including Poo-Pourri, The Chivery, and Orgain.

Below is the full system: capture rates by form type, how to find your send frequency, the segments that matter, custom link tracking almost nobody uses, and how to monetize your unsubscribe page.

Key takeaways

• Discount popups capture 5% to 10%, giveaways reach low teens, and plain newsletter signups get 1% to 2%.
• Find frequency by adding one email a week until engagement or complaints degrade.
• Target 20% open rates on campaigns to protect deliverability.
• Keep spam complaints under 1 in 1,000 and unsubscribes at or below 0.5%.
• Tag your navigation links to learn interests from clicks rather than purchases.
• Monetize the unsubscribe page. One brand converted 500 to 700 sales from 50,000 unsubscribes.
• Use single opt-in. Double opt-in loses 30% to 50% of subscribers.
• A/B test nine out of ten sends, running two to four hours on a 20/80 split.

How much email should capture at each form type

Capture rate depends entirely on what you offer in exchange, and the highest-volume option is not the fastest to convert.

No incentive. A plain “sign up for our newsletter” converts 1% to 2% of visitors.

A discount. Offering 5%, 10%, or 15% off converts 5% to 10%.

A giveaway. Entry into a weekly or monthly drawing converts in the low teens, making it the highest-volume option.

The tradeoff is speed to revenue. A discount converts fastest because the code appears immediately after signup and people buy right away. A giveaway requires waiting for the drawing, announcing a winner, and hoping the rest convert later, which also makes attribution harder.

My own experience matches on quality. Giveaway emails have been consistently worse for me than standard coupon popups, which is why I moved my giveaways to a Messenger bot that awards a prize daily and automatically.

Checkout is the second capture point. Anyone who enters an email, phone, and address and clicks next gets captured whether they complete the purchase or not.

The three types of ecommerce email

Campaigns. One-time sends to a group: Black Friday, a product launch, a holiday offer.

Flows. Automations triggered by behavior, such as a welcome series firing when someone submits a popup without having purchased.

Transactional. Order and shipping confirmations, set up by default in Shopify or WooCommerce. Worth styling on-brand because their open rates are inherently very high.

Campaigns and flows are where the strategic work happens.

How to find your send frequency

Start at one email per week, check your metrics, then add one more each time the numbers hold.

The metrics to watch on each increase: open rate, click-through rate, and conversions on the positive side, and unsubscribes, spam complaints, and bounces on the negative side.

Add a second weekly email if those hold and customer support is not receiving complaints. Add a third. When adding a fourth creates friction, you have found your ceiling, which for most brands lands at two to three.

The thresholds that matter:

• Open rate: at or above 20%.
• Spam complaints: under one per thousand recipients.
• Unsubscribes: 0.5% or lower. At 1% to 3%, investigate.

Klaviyo publishes industry benchmarks from other stores, which is a useful reference for whether your click-through is average or weak.

Segmentation is what lets you exceed the ceiling. Chase’s larger clients send four to six times a week while any individual receives only two or three, because the sends go to different segments.

Whether a 0.5% unsubscribe rate across three weekly emails is acceptable depends on your unit economics. If the revenue is strong and you can acquire replacements profitably, it is a reasonable trade.

Which segments actually matter

Everything is built around an engagement window, then layered with other attributes.

Engagement windows. People who opened or clicked in the last 30, 60, 90, or 120 days. Pick the window that produces a 20% open rate. If a 30-day window is returning 30% to 40%, you are being too strict and can widen it.

Gender. Klaviyo’s predictive analytics estimate likely gender. Rather than sending different emails, reorder the same content so the relevant products appear first, which measurably lifts engagement.

Geography. Two uses. Weather-driven relevance, where flip-flops sell in California and beanies sell in New York on the same day. And shipping offers, where domestic customers get a free shipping promotion that international customers cannot use.

Purchase history. People who bought product A and have not bought complementary product B.

Why the 20% open rate threshold matters

Consistently low open rates damage your domain reputation and deliverability, which affects every email you send afterward.

Open rates in the 5% to 10% range signal to inbox providers that people do not want your mail.

The mistake Chase sees is splitting sends into a highly engaged segment returning 30% and an unengaged segment returning 2%. His preference is blending those into one send that returns 10% to 15%, which reads better in aggregate than a 2% send does in isolation.

For borderline segments, reduce frequency rather than cutting them entirely. A group that would get three emails a week might get one weekly or biweekly instead.

How to run a sunset flow

Give people 10 to 15 chances to open, then move non-openers into a breakup series and suppress them.

At one email per week, that window is roughly three to four months. Anyone who has opened nothing in that period is unlikely to ever open.

The breakup series is a last-chance offer asking whether they want to keep hearing from you. Those who do not respond get tagged as unengaged and suppressed monthly, which stops you paying for them and prevents accidental sends.

One group gets protected from this. People who reliably buy during Black Friday and Cyber Monday and do nothing the rest of the year go into a separate segment, excluded from routine campaigns and never suppressed, then targeted aggressively during the holidays.

What determines your open rate

Four factors, three of which you control.

Where the email lands. You can stay out of spam by following best practices. Whether you land in the primary inbox or the promotions tab is closer to a coin toss.

The from name. Recognition matters. If they do not know who you are, nothing else helps.

The subject line. The single most controllable factor. It needs to be interesting, ideally personalized, and genuinely related to the content.

The preview text. Effectively a second subject line. Use both together to give enough information while leaving something unresolved.

Automation emails run far higher by default. A first welcome email should see 40% to 70% opens because the person just took an action, and that relevance is what drives the number.

How to A/B test campaigns

Test one variable at a time on a 20/80 split, running two to four hours before the winner goes out.

Test subject lines against open rate. Test content against click-through rate, holding the subject line identical.

Split size depends on list size. A million-person list can test on 10% and get significance. A 10,000-person list may need 20% to 30% so each variation reaches at least 1,000 to 1,500 people.

Two hours is the minimum useful runtime and four is roughly the maximum before you start missing optimal send times.

Chase tests nine out of ten sends. The exception is genuinely urgent messages, such as a weather event affecting fulfillment, where speed beats optimization.

Single opt-in versus double opt-in

Use single opt-in. Double opt-in loses 30% to 50% of people who never click the confirmation.

Klaviyo defaults to double opt-in and requires contacting support to unlock single, then disabling it per list, which is deliberate friction.

The exception is a genuinely high bounce rate on the first email, which suggests fake addresses from a spin-to-win wheel or stale addresses from Facebook lead ads. Switching to double opt-in temporarily diagnoses that.

There is also a practical failure mode: sometimes the confirmation email itself does not get delivered, which means those subscribers can never join your list at all.

Custom link tracking most stores never use

Tag every link in your email navigation so a click updates the subscriber’s profile with what they are interested in.

The mechanic: tag the men’s, women’s, children’s, and sale buttons in your header. When someone clicks men’s, their profile records that interest, which you can then combine with Klaviyo’s predicted gender for two independent signals.

The stronger version is building it into the welcome series. For a brand with many categories, show the top nine categories as tagged buttons. Someone clicking sports t-shirts is now segmented into sports content permanently.

The same approach works with in-email surveys. Asking whether someone prefers one-time purchases or subscriptions lets you send subscription offers only to the people who said they want them.

What this captures that purchase history cannot is intent from people who have not yet bought anything.

The realistic yield is modest. Of every ten people who open, perhaps one to three reveal an interest this way, and the rest continue receiving your general segmented sends.

How to monetize your unsubscribe page

Show a time-limited discount code on the unsubscribe confirmation page, since you have already lost the subscriber.

The wording is straightforward: you have been unsubscribed, and if you want to make a purchase in the next 24 hours, here is a code.

The conversion percentage is low and the volume makes it worthwhile. One larger client accumulated roughly 50,000 unsubscribes over eight to ten months and converted somewhere between 500 and 700 sales from that page.

Even at much smaller scale, any sale from someone who was leaving is revenue you would not otherwise have had.

Plain text versus designed emails

The answer is a mix, and specific email types are strong candidates for plain text.

The post-purchase thank you. From the founder or community manager, with a signature, expressing genuine gratitude.

The final abandoned cart email. After two designed emails, a plain note saying the team reached out twice and asking whether they had questions.

Short announcements. A quick heads-up that something drops tomorrow does not need design.

Plain text also helps with the promotions tab. Live text that is genuinely typed rather than embedded in an image, combined with personalization, improves your odds of landing in the primary inbox. Nothing guarantees it.

Many brands resist because design is how they express the brand, and Chase typically moves those clients from fully designed toward roughly 75/25.

GIFs are used heavily, both to link to video, which Klaviyo does not support natively, and to simulate product carousels.

Shared versus dedicated sending IPs

Shared pools help small senders borrow reputation, and one bad sender in the pool can damage everyone in it.

Moving to a dedicated IP means controlling your own reputation entirely, which cuts both ways.

Chase uses dedicated for his own sending and hesitates to recommend it broadly. If you are not rigorously cleaning your list and following best practices, shared is safer.

If you are following best practices and still having deliverability problems, ask your provider who else is in your pool and whether you can move.

What is being tested next

AMP for email, which makes emails behave more like landing pages with interactive elements.

The specific applications: product carousels people can click through inside the email, and accordion sections that expand, which Chase wants to use for an FAQ covering return policy and shipping times.

The barriers are real. It requires approval from both your email provider and Google, plus significant technical capability, which has made it difficult to roll out for clients.

Frequently asked questions

How much revenue should email drive for an ecommerce store?

Between 20% and 30% of total revenue. Below that you are likely leaving money on the table through insufficient send frequency, weak segmentation, or missing automation flows.

How many marketing emails should you send per week?

Start at one and add one more each time your metrics hold, stopping when adding another creates friction. Most brands land at two to three. Segmentation lets you send four to six times weekly while any individual receives only two or three.

What email metrics indicate a problem?

Open rates below 20% hurt deliverability. Spam complaints should stay under one per thousand recipients. Unsubscribes should be 0.5% or lower, and rates of 1% to 3% warrant investigation.

What converts best for capturing emails?

Giveaways capture the most addresses at low double digits, discounts capture 5% to 10% and convert to sales fastest, and a plain newsletter signup captures 1% to 2%. Discount codes convert quickest because buyers act immediately.

Should you use single or double opt-in?

Single opt-in in almost all cases, since double opt-in loses 30% to 50% of subscribers who never click the confirmation, and confirmation emails sometimes fail to deliver. Switch to double temporarily only if you see an unusually high bounce rate.

How do you learn what subscribers are interested in?

Tag the links in your email navigation so clicks write an interest property to the subscriber’s profile. Combine that with predicted gender for two independent signals. Building tagged category buttons into your welcome series accelerates this.

Can you make money from people who unsubscribe?

Yes. Show a time-limited discount code on the unsubscribe confirmation page. One brand converted between 500 and 700 sales from roughly 50,000 unsubscribes, which is revenue from people already walking away.