Email Still Returns $36 for Every $1 Spent. Your Customer List Is the Asset Nobody Works.

In plain terms: Litmus's State of Email research puts it flatly: "On average, email drives an ROI of $36 for every dollar spent, higher than any other channel." And the list that number runs on, the people who already bought from you, is probably sitting inside your point-of-sale system right now, hearing exactly nothing.

Every ad dollar you spend rents attention. The moment you stop paying, the attention stops. That is the deal with ads, and it is a fine deal, but it is rent.

Meanwhile, buried in your POS or booking software is a list of people who already found you, already trusted you, and already handed you money. You own that list outright. Nobody can raise the price on it, and nobody can take it away from you.

And if you are like most local businesses, you send it nothing at all.

The number, and where it comes from

Litmus has surveyed marketers about email performance for years, and their average is the one quoted above: $36 back for every dollar spent, higher than any other channel. In their 2025 State of Email survey of roughly 500 marketing professionals, 30% of companies reported getting $36 to $50 back per dollar, and 5% reported over $50. An earlier Litmus survey from 2020, that one covering more than 2,000 marketers, found retail and ecommerce did best of all at about $45 per dollar.

And you do not have to take one company's word for it. The UK Data & Marketing Association's Marketer Email Tracker 2026, published in March 2026 from a survey of 250 marketers, puts email ROI at about 41 pounds back for every pound spent, up from about 38 the year before. Two organizations, two countries, years of surveys, and the answer keeps landing in the mid-30s to low-40s. This is not a one-year fluke. Email has quietly been the highest-return channel for a long time.

The one channel you actually own

Think about where your customers' attention lives. The ad platforms rent it to you by the click. The social feeds decide who sees your posts. Even your spot in the search results can move because someone else changed something.

The email list is different. Those addresses were given to you, by name, by people who chose to do business with you. It is the only channel where you own the connection instead of leasing it. That is exactly why the return is so high: you are not paying to earn a stranger's trust, you are talking to people who already gave it.

Why it sits in the drawer anyway

Here is the honest reason, and it is not laziness. Working the list feels like a project. You would have to dig the emails out of the register software, figure out a sending tool, decide what to say, worry about annoying people, and then remember to do it all again next week. You are busy running the business, so the project never starts.

So the addresses pile up quietly, a few more every day, hundreds over a year or two, and none of them ever hear from you. That is not a marketing gap. That is money left in a drawer.

The return comes from the machine, not the list

This is the part most owners miss. Having a list earns you nothing. The $36 comes from working it, and working it consistently is a system, not a chore you will into existence.

The system pulls new customer emails out of your POS automatically, so nobody is exporting spreadsheets. It separates past buyers from leads who never closed, because those two groups need different messages. It sends on a steady schedule, with offers matched to what each person actually bought. And when someone replies, it routes them straight to you, because that reply is a sale in motion. That is the kind of system I build.

What this means for you

Before you spend another dollar renting attention from strangers, open your POS and count the customer emails sitting in it. Then ask one question: what did those people get from us last month? If the answer is nothing, the highest-return channel in marketing is sitting in your building, fully paid for, doing zero work.

AI Lead Nurture is the system I set up for exactly this, so the list you already own gets worked every week without you touching it.

FAQ

My list is only a few hundred people. Is that even worth it? Yes. These are not cold names, they are people who already bought from you. A few hundred past customers routinely beat thousands of strangers, because the expensive part of the sale, the trust, is already done.

Isn't email dead? Nobody reads it anymore. The numbers say otherwise. Two separate industry trackers, in two different countries, still measure email as the highest-return channel year after year. What is dead is bad email, generic blasts with nothing in them for the reader.

What would I even send? Not a newsletter for the sake of a newsletter. Offers matched to what someone bought, a reminder when they are due to come back, a real reason to return. If it is useful to the person reading it, it is welcome.