What Email Marketing Actually Returns, According to 18 Benchmark Reports

The Return Marketers Report

Self-reported ROI varies enormously by who's asked and how. In Litmus's 2025 State of Email Survey of nearly 500 marketing professionals, 35% of respondents report a return of $10-$36 for every $1 spent, 30% report $36-$50, and 5% report more than $50⁴. Broken out by industry, retail, ecommerce, and consumer goods report the highest return at 45:1, followed by marketing, PR, and advertising agencies at 42:1, software and technology at 36:1, and media, publishing, events, sports, and entertainment at 32:1⁴.

Platform-measured numbers, as opposed to self-reported survey answers, tell a different story again. Omnisend's merchants on paid plans saw an estimated average return of $79 for every $1 spent on email, SMS, and push in 2025, by Omnisend's own internal analysis, though Omnisend notes results vary by merchant³. Barilliance's compilation of Data & Marketing Association research puts the average closer to $38 per $1 invested¹². HubSpot's compiled figures, citing Litmus, put the typical range at 10:1 to 36:1, with top-performing programs exceeding 50:1⁵.

The gap between these numbers is itself a finding: ROI is being measured at least three different ways across the industry (marketer self-report, platform-attributed revenue, and third-party survey compilation), and none of them agree closely. Only about 22% of marketers rank email among their top ROI-driving channels at all⁵, and 21% of marketing leaders say they don't measure email ROI in any form, down from 36% in Litmus's 2023 survey⁴.

Opens and Clicks: Nine Platforms, Nine Different Numbers

Every major email platform publishes its own open-rate and click-rate benchmarks, and they disagree with each other by wide margins because each measures a different customer base, list-size threshold, and time period. Mailchimp's overall average, based on billions of tracked sends restricted to campaigns of at least 1,000 subscribers and last updated December 2023, was a 35.63% open rate and 2.62% click rate². GetResponse, analyzing more than 4.4 billion messages sent by its customers with at least 500 contacts in 2023, found a 39.64% open rate and 3.25% click-through rate⁷. ActiveCampaign's analysis of 3.3 million campaigns put the open rate at 42.35% and click rate at 2.62%⁸. MailerLite, analyzing more than 3.6 million campaigns from 181,000 accounts over the twelve months from December 2024 to November 2025, recorded a 43.46% open rate (up from 42.35% the year before) and a 2.09% click rate⁹.

Two outliers make the spread even starker. Twilio SendGrid, analyzing more than 5 trillion emails sent between January and December 2022, reported a much lower 19.09% average unique open rate (median 15.75%) alongside a higher 4.48% average click rate (median 2.01%)¹⁴. Campaign Monitor's 2021 data, drawn from over 100 billion emails and published in 2022, showed a 21.5% open rate and 2.3% click rate¹⁰, from before Apple's Mail Privacy Protection began inflating open-rate tracking industry-wide.

Click-to-open rate, which measures engagement among people who did open, moved in the same direction across platforms that reported it over time: MailerLite's rose from 5.63% to 6.81% year-over-year, while its unsubscribe rate more than doubled, from 0.08% to 0.22%⁹. Nearly 1 in 6 marketing emails industry-wide fail to be delivered at all, per ActiveCampaign's compiled data⁸.

Automation and Personalization Multiply Everything

The clearest, most consistent finding across every platform that tracks it is that automated and behavior-triggered emails dramatically outperform one-off broadcast campaigns, whichever ROI or engagement measure is used. At Klaviyo, automated "flow" emails, sent to just 5.3% of total volume, generate nearly 41% of total email revenue, with an average revenue per recipient nearly 18 times higher than one-off campaigns and click rates more than 3 times higher (5.58% versus 1.69%)¹. Nearly 48% of flow-driven revenue comes from new buyers, versus about 16% for one-off campaigns¹.

Omnisend sees the same pattern at even greater scale: automated emails drove 37% of all email-generated sales in 2024 despite making up only about 2% of total sends³. MoEngage's industry-level data shows how far behavior-based targeting can stretch the gap: in retail and ecommerce, behavior-based emails convert 60.7 times more often and generate 22.6 times more clicks than broadcast sends, against a retail baseline of a 32.59% open rate, 2.68% conversion rate, and 98.03% deliverability¹⁶. In media and entertainment, journey-based email drove a 2,043.4-times conversion-rate multiplier over broadcast¹⁶. Segmented email campaigns generate 36% of total email revenue industry-wide, and triggered campaigns produce 306% more clicks per email than non-triggered sends, per Barilliance's compilation of DMA data¹².

What Consumers Say They Want, and How Often They Tune Out

Behind the platform numbers is a simpler consumer preference: 69% of consumers worldwide say email is their preferred channel for hearing from brands, ahead of SMS/MMS at 53%, per a June 2024 Emarsys survey of 10,041 consumers across Australia, Germany, the UAE, the UK, and the US¹⁷. That preference has a ceiling, though: 25% of consumers worldwide say they unsubscribe from brand email or texts at least once a week, per GetApp's 2024 Advertising Preferences Survey of 2,000 US adults¹⁷.

On the B2B side, email remains the channel marketers lean on most for both personalization and thought leadership. In Content Marketing Institute's survey of 1,015 B2B marketers, fielded June-August 2025, 85% say email campaigns are where they implement personalization efforts, the single most common channel named, and email newsletters rank as the second most effective channel for distributing thought leadership content (54%), behind only LinkedIn (76%)¹⁸. 36% of B2B marketers now use AI tools specifically for email campaign optimization and personalized content¹⁸.

Real revenue tracks the same channel loyalty. During Cyber Week 2025, Attentive drove nearly $2 billion in revenue across SMS, email, and push for more than 8,000 brands, sending 5.7 billion messages, up 46% year-over-year¹⁵. Revenue per brand grew 29% year-over-year on email, against 42% on SMS, while email's click-through rate rose 4.7% year-over-year and its opt-out rate fell 17%¹⁵.

The Number Underneath the Number

The single most important stat in this entire dataset may be the least visible one. The 2026 DMA Email Benchmark Report found a global average delivered rate of 99.2%, the kind of number that looks like near-perfect performance. But its inbox placement rate, meaning mail that actually reaches the inbox rather than spam or nowhere at all, was just 87% globally (91% in the UK, down more than two points year-over-year)⁶. Unique opens averaged 40% industry-wide, but the report's "true open" rate, which strips out mailbox-provider inflation from things like Apple Mail Privacy Protection, was just 11%⁶.

That gap matters for the ROI numbers earlier in this piece: inactive subscribers, who rarely open or click at all, can still account for roughly 25% of a program's total recorded revenue, inflating both the numerator and denominator of any ROI calculation built on list-wide averages⁶. Sinch's 2026 Email Impact Report, surveying more than 1,200 email senders across five countries and benchmarking over 400 billion emails, found that while roughly half of senders rate deliverability as "extremely important," many are unable to reliably calculate email ROI at all, because digital customer journeys now cross too many touchpoints to attribute cleanly to one channel¹³. B2B senders did show real improvement in one measurable area: delivered rates climbed from 90.7% to 95.6% year-over-year, even as retail and travel sit at the bottom for clicks, at 1.0% and 1.2% respectively⁶.

Put together, the reports agree on a direction rather than a number: email is a real, high-return channel by any measure used, automation and personalization multiply that return substantially, and consumers still prefer it to competing channels. But the specific ROI or open-rate figure any single business should expect depends entirely on how it's measured, and most of the industry's benchmark reports are measuring slightly different things.