Email does a lot more work than is usually given credit for. In Sinch Mailgun’s latest Email Impact Report, 78% of respondents say email is “very” or “extremely” important to their organization’s success, which tells you pretty quickly that it’s still a critical business channel.
The problem is that importance and measurability don’t match. Only 46% of marketers say they can measure the ROI of promotional emails, while 43% say they can measure the ROI of transactional emails.
So email occupies a strange place for many teams. This is obviously essential, but its contribution is even harder to quantify than many marketers would like.
The return on investment is there, but the visibility is uneven
Once you look at marketers who can measure ROI, the returns become hard to ignore. Of those surveyed who measure the ROI of promotional emails, 60% say they generate more than $10 for every dollar spent.
Transactional email seems just as powerful, and in some cases, a bit stronger. Among marketers who measure the ROI of transactional emails, 62% say they return more than $10 for every dollar spent.
There is also a smaller group that reports particularly high returns. Thirteen percent of respondents measuring the ROI of promotional emails and 14% measuring the ROI of transactional emails say they generate more than $40 for every dollar spent.
This creates a familiar martech tension. The channel seems to perform very well for teams with the right metric in place, while everyone else has to try to fill the gap.
Transactional email is an easier argument to make
Part of this gap comes from the nature of the messages themselves. Transactional emails include things like order confirmations, fraud alerts, password resets, and shipping updates. They are therefore generally linked to specific customer actions and are easier to link to results.
Promotional email is a little more complicated. This often works across longer buying cycles and multiple touchpoints, making attribution more difficult even when emails clearly influence engagement or conversions.
This complexity shapes how teams evaluate performance. When attribution becomes complicated, marketers tend to fall back on the metrics that are easiest to access and explain.
This is one reason why ROI can remain unclear, even in organizations that rely heavily on email. The performance may be there, but the proof is often incomplete.
Marketers still rely on simpler metrics
The report shows that many teams still use engagement metrics as their primary guide. Click-through rates, delivery rates, and deliverability metrics remain common ways to evaluate email performance, even if they don’t always show a direct impact on the business.
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The real problem is that income-based measures are less common. Fewer organizations track metrics like total messaging channel revenue or revenue per campaign, making it harder to connect messaging activity to financial results.
This makes it more difficult when marketers try to demand more resources. The report identifies budget constraints as the biggest barrier to investing in email, while proving ROI, prioritizing email, and addressing strategy or integration issues also hold teams back.
Together, the findings describe a channel that remains critical to business success and is often highly profitable, but is not measured well enough for many teams to defend it as aggressively as they probably should.
Source: Sinch Mailgun Email Impact Report. (No registration required)
