Email Marketing’s ROI Doesn’t Matter

Posted by Chad S. White on April 29, 2016

We love email marketing here at Litmus, and are frankly often frustrated that some companies don’t see its value. To try to convince them, we frequently tout email marketing’s stellar return on investment, which is 38-to-1, according to research by the Direct Marketing Association.

We’ve mentioned it in this report and this blog post and this one and this one too—and that’s just in the past few months. And plenty of other email marketing companies have done the same over the years.

Heck, I’ve gone so far as to argue that email marketing’s ROI is closer to 130-to-1.

But despite our collective rah-rah around the ROI opportunity, companies still significantly underinvest in email marketing. For example, brands spend 15% of their marketing budget on email marketing on average, while the channel generates 23% of total sales, according to a study by Adestra and Econsultancy.

As much as we’d like email marketing’s ROI to matter to more brands, it simply doesn’t. Here are some reasons why that’s the case…