Emails Received Trend, Klaviyo

Emails Received Trend for the selected period. The count of emails actually delivered to the inbox over time, sends minus bounces. How to read it, why it matters, and how to act on it.

Metrics type: Supporting Metrics • Category: Email Marketing

The count of emails that actually reached recipients over time. Received equals sent minus bounced, so a gap opening between this line and your send line is an early deliverability warning.

At a glance

The number of delivered emails per period bucket, plotted over the selected window. “Received” here means delivered: the messages a mailbox provider accepted, which is gross sends minus hard and soft bounces. This is the true denominator for every downstream engagement rate, because opens and clicks can only happen on emails that were actually delivered. Watch the gap between this line and your total-sends line: when received volume falls below sends and stays there, bounces are rising and a deliverability problem is forming. A healthy program keeps received tracking close to sends.

What it counts	The sum of delivered per period bucket, plotted as an area chart over the selected window. Delivered equals sends accepted by the mailbox provider, that is sends minus bounces.
API endpoint + statistics field	POST /api/campaign-values-reports and GET /api/metric-aggregates, returning the delivered statistic (with bounced and bounce_rate for context).
Email vs SMS aggregation	Email only. SMS delivery is tracked under its own channel and not blended here.
MPP impact	None. Delivery is a server-to-server acceptance event, unaffected by Apple Mail Privacy, which only touches opens.
Chart type	Area.
Time window	30D vsP
Alert trigger	A widening gap between received and sent volume, which indicates rising bounces and possible deliverability erosion.
Roles	owner, marketing

Calculation

Calculated automatically from your Klaviyo data. See the At a glance summary above for what the metric tracks and the worked example below for a typical reading.

Worked example

An illustrative supplements brand on Klaviyo sending a steady weekly campaign cadence. Reading the dashboard on 14 Apr 26 for the trailing 30 days (14 Mar 26 to 12 Apr 26), the received-volume area chart by week, next to sends, looks like this (illustrative figures):

Week	Sends	Delivered (received)	Bounced	Delivery rate
14-20 Mar 26	60,000	59,400	600	99.0%
21-27 Mar 26	61,000	60,390	610	99.0%
28 Mar-3 Apr 26	60,500	57,475	3,025	95.0%
4-12 Apr 26	62,000	58,280	3,720	94.0%

Week 3 received = 57,475 of 60,500 sent, delivery rate 95.0%
Week 1 received = 59,400 of 60,000 sent, delivery rate 99.0%
Gap that opened by week 3 = roughly 4 percentage points of bounce

Five observations:

1. In weeks 1 and 2 the received line sits right under the send line, a 1% gap. That is a healthy, stable program: almost every message sent is being accepted by mailbox providers. The two lines move together.
2. From week 3 a gap opens. Received dropped to 95% of sends and then 94% in week 4, while sends held steady. A widening gap on flat sends is the classic early signature of a deliverability problem: more messages are bouncing rather than reaching inboxes.
3. The likely trigger is a list or reputation event. A jump in bounces like this often follows importing a stale or purchased list, a re-engagement send to long-dormant contacts, or a sender-reputation knock. The received line is where it shows up first, before opens and clicks even get a chance to react.
4. Received is the honest denominator for engagement. When you compute open or click rate, you want it over delivered, not sent. If received volume falls, a stable number of opens will look like a rising open rate purely because the denominator shrank. Always sanity-check engagement-rate moves against this line.
5. The action is to investigate bounces, not to send more. Pushing more volume through a degrading sender reputation widens the gap further. Check Bounce Rate and Delivery Rate, clean the list of repeated hard bounces, and pause sends to dormant segments until reputation recovers.

Sibling cards merchants should reference together

Emails Received Trend is the bridge between what you sent and what got engaged. Pair it with these:

Card	Why pair it with Emails Received Trend
Total Sends	The gross figure above received. The gap between sends and received is exactly the bounced volume, so read them as a pair.
Delivery Rate	The percentage form of this metric. Received volume falling while sends hold steady is the same story delivery rate tells as a ratio.
Bounce Rate	The cause of any gap. A widening received-vs-sent gap is rising bounces; this card explains why.
Engagement Funnel	Received is the top of the funnel after sends. Use it to confirm that engagement-rate moves are not just denominator effects.
Opened Trend	The next step down the funnel. Opens can only happen on received emails, so a received drop caps opens regardless of content.

Reconciling against Klaviyo

Where to look in Klaviyo:

• Klaviyo → Analytics → Metrics, then the delivered metric, for the received count over time.
• Klaviyo → Campaigns, then a specific campaign’s analytics, where delivered and bounced are shown side by side.
• Klaviyo → Analytics → Performance, for the blended delivery picture across campaigns and flows.

Why our number may legitimately differ:

Reason	Direction of divergence
Time zone. Vortex IQ buckets delivery events by UTC day; Klaviyo uses your account time zone. Late-night sends can land in a different bucket.	Either direction, usually marginal.
Soft-bounce timing. A message can be accepted then soft-bounce on retry. Depending on when each system snapshots, a borderline send may count as delivered in one and bounced in the other.	Either direction, small.
Page caps. Campaign-values reporting pages at 50 records per pull, so very high-volume accounts may see slight aggregation truncation.	Reported volume runs marginally low for very large senders.
Period boundaries. Vortex IQ uses a 30-day rolling window vs prior; Klaviyo dashboards often default to calendar months.	Either direction.
Campaign vs flow scope. A campaign-only Klaviyo view will not match our blended campaign-plus-flow delivered count.	Ours reads higher than a campaign-only view.

Known limitations / merchant FAQs

What does “received” actually mean here? Delivered. It is the count of emails a mailbox provider accepted, which equals your gross sends minus bounces. It does not mean a human read or even saw the email, only that the message reached the recipient’s mail server rather than bouncing. Inbox-vs-spam placement is a separate question this metric does not measure.

How is this different from Total Sends? Sends is gross (every message you attempted to send). Received is net of bounces (the ones that were accepted). The gap between the two lines is your bounced volume. When the lines track closely you have healthy deliverability; when a gap opens, bounces are rising.

The received line dropped below sends, what do I do? That gap is rising bounces, an early deliverability warning. Check Bounce Rate to see whether it is hard bounces (dead addresses, list-quality issue) or soft bounces (temporary, often reputation or full-mailbox). Clean repeated hard bounces from the list and pause sends to dormant segments until the gap closes. Do not push more volume through a degrading reputation.

Does this tell me if emails landed in spam? No. Delivered means accepted by the mail server, which includes messages routed to the spam or Promotions folder. To infer placement you have to read this alongside engagement: a high delivered count with a sudden open and click collapse often points to spam-folder placement even though delivery looks fine.

Is this affected by Apple Mail Privacy? No. MPP only inflates opens. Delivery is a server-to-server acceptance event with no human or image-loading involved, so received volume is a clean signal.

Why does my received count differ from Klaviyo’s? Usually time-zone bucketing (our UTC vs your account zone), soft-bounce timing differences (a borderline send counted as delivered in one system and bounced in the other), or period boundaries. Match the date range and channel scope before treating it as a real gap.

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Tracked live in Vortex IQ Nerve Centre

Emails Received Trend is one of hundreds of KPI pulses Vortex IQ tracks across Klaviyo and 70+ other ecommerce connectors. Nerve Centre runs the detection layer; Vortex Mind investigates the cause when something moves; Ask Viq lets you interrogate any number in plain English.

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