Email returns about $36 for every $1 spent — roughly 30 times the next best channel. Here is why it keeps winning, and the six parts every working program is built from.
Cyril Nie
Author
Email makes money. For every $1 you spend, you get about $36 back. People say email is dead every year. Every year, it quietly beats everything else.
Here is why. You own your email list. You don’t rent it from Meta or Google. An algorithm change can’t take it away. On Facebook, only about 5% of your fans see your posts. With email, about 21% of people open, and 2–3% click. And those people asked to hear from you. Email is the only channel where someone said “yes, I want this.”
Those preferences are steady. 89% of marketers still use email as their primary channel for lead generation, and 51% of consumers say it is their preferred way to hear from brands. Neither number has moved much in a decade.
That gap is not small. Email pays back about 30 times what the next best channel does. Source: Litmus, which puts email ROI at 3,600% — against 122% for newsletter-as-a-business models, 28% for social media and 25% for paid search.
What does that mean in real life? For a good online store, email brings in 25–35% of all the money. The best stores hit 40% or more. If your store makes $100,000 a month and email brings in less than $25,000, there is money on the table.
Here is a secret most people miss. On days you send an email, you sell more — even to people who never opened it. Seeing your name in their inbox reminds them you exist. They buy later through your website, search, or even your store. Send days show 15–30% more revenue than quiet days. So if a report says email “only” made a little money, it is undercounting.
Every email program has six parts. They all connect. Pull one out and the whole thing breaks.
Your sending platform. The tool that sends the emails and holds your list.
Authentication. Three settings (SPF, DKIM, DMARC) that prove you are real. Without them, you land in spam. Since 2024, Google and Yahoo require them.
Your list. A clean list of 5,000 people who care beats a messy list of 50,000 every time.
Content and design. The emails themselves. Over 60% are read on phones, so design for phones first.
Automation. Emails that send themselves — welcome emails, cart reminders, follow-ups. These earn 17.6x more money per person than one-off blasts on average, and up to 30x for the strongest single flow. If you remember one thing from this book, remember that.
Analytics. The scoreboard. 21% of marketers never measure their email results. They are flying blind. Don’t be one of them.
Yes. Email returns about $36 for every $1 spent, which is roughly 30 times what the next best channel returns. It is also the only channel where you own the audience list outright, so no algorithm change can take it away.
For a healthy ecommerce business, email drives 25 to 35 percent of total revenue. The strongest stores reach 40 percent or more. If your store makes $100,000 a month and email brings in less than $25,000, there is room to grow.
A sending platform, authentication (SPF, DKIM and DMARC), a clean list, content and design, automation, and analytics. They are interdependent, so a weakness in any one of them caps the results of the other five.
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