Email does a lot more work than it is usually given credit for. In Sinch Mailgun’s latest Email Impact Report, 78% of respondents say email is “very” or “extremely” important to the success of their organization, quickly proving that it is still a critical business channel.
The problem is that importance and measurability are not aligned. 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 is in a strange place for many teams. It’s clearly essential, but its contribution is even harder to quantify than many marketers would like.
The ROI is there, but the visibility is not uniform
When you consider marketers capable of measuring ROI, the returns become difficult to ignore. Of those surveyed measuring the ROI of promotional emails, 60% say it generates more than $10 for every dollar spent.
Transactional email seems just as powerful, and in some cases, a little more powerful. Among marketers measuring transactional email ROI, 62% report returns greater than $10 for every dollar spent.
There is also a smaller group that reports particularly high returns. Thirteen percent of respondents measuring ROI from promotional emails and 14% measuring ROI from transactional emails say they generate more than $40 for every dollar spent.
This creates a familiar martech tension. The channel seems to work very well for teams with the right measurement, while everyone else has to try to fill in the blanks.
Transactional email has a simpler case to make
Part of this gap stems from the nature of the messages themselves. Transactional emails include things like order confirmations, fraud alerts, password resets, and shipping updates, so they’re usually tied to specific customer actions and are easier to link to outcomes.
Promotional emails are a little more complicated. It often works across longer purchase cycles and multiple touchpoints, making attribution more difficult even when emails clearly influence engagement or conversions.
This complexity determines how teams evaluate performance. When attribution becomes confusing, marketers tend to fall back to the metrics that are easiest to access and explain.
This is one reason why ROI can remain uncertain even in organizations that rely heavily on email. The performance may be there, but the evidence is often incomplete.
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Marketers still rely on simpler metrics
The report shows that many teams still use engagement measures as their primary guide. Click-through rates, delivery rates, and delivery metrics remain common ways to judge email performance, even if they don’t always show direct business impact.
The real problem is that revenue-based metrics are less common. Fewer organizations track metrics like total email channel revenue or revenue per campaign, making it more difficult to link email activity to financial results.
This makes it more difficult when marketers try to advocate for more resources. The report identifies budget constraints as the biggest barrier to investing in email, while demonstrating that ROI, email prioritization, and managing strategy or integration issues also hold teams back.
Taken together, the findings describe a channel that is still central to business success and often highly profitable, but 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)
