Email does a lot more work than it usually gets. In the latest Sinch Mailgun Email Score Report, 78% of respondents said email is “very” or “extremely” important to their organization’s success, which tells you quickly that this is still a core business channel.
The problem is that value and measurement are not linear. Only 46% of marketers say they can measure the ROI of promotional email, while 43% say they can measure the ROI of transactional email.
So email sits in a strange place for many teams. It’s clearly important, but its contribution is still harder to quantify than most marketers would like.
The ROI is there, but visibility is uneven
When you look at vendors who can’t measure ROI, returns are hard to ignore. Among respondents who measured email promotional ROI, 60% said it brought in more than $10 for every $1 spent.
Transactional email looks powerful, and in some cases, a little too powerful. Of marketers who measure transactional email ROI, 62% report more than $10 in return for every $1 spent.
There is also a small group that reports particularly high benefits. Thirteen percent of respondents measuring promotional email ROI and 14% measuring email marketing ROI said they generate more than $40 per dollar spent.
That creates a common martech tension. The channel seems to do best in the right scale groups, while everyone else is left trying to fill in the gaps.
Transactional email has an easy way to do it
Part of that gap comes from the nature of the messages themselves. Transactional emails include things like order confirmations, fraud alerts, password resets and shipping updates, so they’re often tied to specific customer actions and easy to link to results.
Promotional email is very complex. It often works across long buying cycles and multiple touch points, making annotation difficult even when emails clearly influence engagement or conversion.
That complexity shapes how teams evaluate performance. When attribution becomes negative, marketers tend to fall back on metrics that are easy to access and explain.
This is one of the reasons ROI can remain elusive even for organizations that rely heavily on email. The effectiveness may be there, but the evidence is often inconclusive.
Your customers are searching everywhere. Make sure it’s your product he appears.
The SEO toolkit you know, and the AI visibility data you need.
Start a Free Trial
Start with
Marketers still rely on simple metrics
The report shows that many groups still use collaborative methods as their main guide. Click-through rates, delivery rates and deliverability metrics are still common ways to judge email performance, although they don’t always reflect direct business impact.
The real problem is that income-based estimates are not that common. Few organizations track metrics like total email channel revenue or revenue per campaign, making it difficult to connect email activity to financial results.
That makes it difficult when sellers try to compete for more resources. The report identifies budget constraints as the biggest barrier to investing in email, while proving ROI, prioritizing email and dealing with strategic or integration issues are also holding teams back.
Taken together, the findings describe a channel that is still central to business success and is often highly profitable, but is not measured well enough for many groups to defend it as aggressively as they should.
Source: Sinch Mailgun Email Impact Report. (No registration required)
