March 18, 2026
Every year brings fresh predictions that email marketing is on its way out. Every year, the return-on-investment data says otherwise.
According to a comprehensive small business marketing statistics analysis published by BizIQ, drawing on benchmark research from Litmus and Campaign Monitor, email marketing returns an average of $42 for every $1 spent — the highest return of any major marketing channel tracked. By comparison, the same analysis puts local SEO at roughly $13 returned per $1 invested, and Google Ads, based on Google's own economic impact research, at around $8 per $1 spent.
A separate small business budget analysis from Revenue Memo found that marketers allocate an average of just 8% of their marketing budget to email, despite the channel's outsized return relative to spend — a gap that shows up repeatedly across small business benchmarking studies. The same research found paid media now accounts for nearly 30% of small business marketing budgets, up from 23% in 2019, even as its measured ROI per dollar remains well below email's.
Part of the disconnect may be structural rather than strategic: building and maintaining an engaged email list takes sustained effort, and platforms like Gmail and Yahoo have tightened deliverability enforcement in 2026, meaning poorly maintained lists now face real inbox placement risk. Businesses that treat their list as a maintained asset — clean, permission-based, and properly authenticated — are better positioned to capture that return than those sending occasional blasts to an old, unmaintained list.
For small businesses weighing how much of a limited budget should go toward building an email list versus other channels, our free Business Marketing Blueprint Generator factors channel-level cost-per-acquisition ranges directly into your personalized plan.