Yes, for audiences you own. The reason is not the return-on-investment statistic in every article on this subject. It is that an email list is one of the few channels where reaching your audience does not require paying a platform for permission or surviving a ranking change.
Published by emailcampaign.ai, which sells email sending infrastructure. We benefit if you conclude yes, so the weak parts of the case are stated as plainly as the strong ones.
The statistic worth being careful with
Almost every article on this question cites a return of around forty dollars for every dollar spent. It is worth knowing where that comes from before planning against it.
The figure traces back to industry survey work in which marketers estimated their own returns. It is self-reported rather than audited, it is several years old, and it averages across wildly different businesses, from ecommerce with direct attribution to B2B with a nine-month sales cycle. It is a directional claim about a channel, not a forecast for your account.
Quoting it back at yourself is harmless. Budgeting against it is not.
What actually still holds
You own the list. This is the durable argument. Social reach depends on an algorithm that can change overnight, and paid reach depends on an auction that gets more expensive. An email address you collected with consent reaches that person as long as they let it. Nothing sits between you.
It compounds. A list built over three years keeps working. Ad spend stops producing the day you stop paying.
Attribution is unusually clean. Compared with most channels, you can see which message led to which purchase without a modelling exercise.
Costs scale slowly. Platform pricing usually tracks list size rather than sends, so an engaged list gets cheaper per outcome as it matures.
What genuinely got harder
| Change | When | What it means now |
|---|---|---|
| Apple Mail Privacy Protection | 2021 | Images pre-load on the recipient's behalf, registering opens no human performed. Open rate is no longer a clean signal |
| Google and Yahoo bulk sender requirements | 2024 | Authentication, one-click unsubscribe and a complaint rate under published thresholds became entry conditions rather than best practice |
The second is the more consequential. Requirements that were advisory became conditions of delivery: SPF, DKIM and DMARC in place, a working one-click unsubscribe, and complaint rates kept under the published threshold, which Google states as below 0.1 percent and never reaching 0.3.
The practical effect is that effort moved. It used to go into the send. It now goes into making sure the send arrives.
Where it stops being worth it
Being fair about this matters more than the case in favour.
- A bought list. The return is negative, because the bounce and complaint rates damage a sending domain that all your future email depends on.
- An unengaged list you keep mailing. Sending to people who never open teaches receivers that your mail is unwanted, which costs you delivery to the people who do.
- A cadence that outruns what you have to say. Weekly sending with nothing to report produces unsubscribes and complaints rather than familiarity.
- Judging it on opens. A channel optimised against an unreliable metric will be optimised in the wrong direction.
Measuring it honestly
Ignore the industry benchmark and calculate your own. Revenue attributable to email, divided by the platform cost plus the time spent producing it. That number is comparable to your other channels, which the forty-to-one figure is not.
Judge campaigns on clicks and revenue per send rather than opens. For cold outreach, judge on replies and meetings booked, both of which require a person to act and therefore cannot be inflated by a proxy fetch.
The short version
Worth it for an audience you own, provided you have done the deliverability work that is now a precondition rather than an optimisation. Not worth it as a way to reach people who have never heard of you cheaply, which is a different channel with different rules.
Questions, answered straight
- Is email marketing still worth it in 2026?
- Yes, for audiences you own, and the core reason is unchanged: you can reach a list directly without paying a platform for access or being subject to an algorithm. What has changed is that the bar for arriving at all is higher, so the work has shifted from sending to deliverability.
- Is the $42 return per $1 spent figure real?
- It is widely quoted and traces back to industry survey work from several years ago, based on self-reported marketer estimates rather than audited accounts. Treat it as directional rather than as a number to plan against. Measure your own return instead.
- Has email marketing become harder?
- Yes, in two specific ways. Open rate stopped being reliable in 2021 when Apple Mail Privacy Protection began pre-loading images, and in 2024 Google and Yahoo introduced bulk sender requirements covering authentication, one-click unsubscribe and complaint rates.
- What is a realistic return from email today?
- It depends entirely on whether you own the list and how relevant the sending is. The honest answer is that no benchmark substitutes for measuring your own revenue per send against your own costs, including the platform and the time.
- Is cold email still worth it?
- It is a different question with a different answer. Cold outreach is worth it when your deal size supports a cost per contact and your market is too large to call. It is not worth it as a volume play, because volume is what damages sending domains.
Published 22 September 2026. Updated 22 September 2026. Written by the team that runs the infrastructure; numbers come from the platform's own provisioning and sending, and from the providers' published documentation at the time of writing.