Every few years this question resurfaces. Email is dead. Social media killed it. TikTok killed it. AI will kill it. And every single time, the data says the same thing: email is not just alive, it is the highest-returning marketing channel available to ecommerce brands, and it is getting more valuable, not less.
Here is why, with numbers to back it.
The Headline Numbers First
Email marketing returns between $36 and $45 for every $1 spent for ecommerce and retail brands. That figure has not declined. It has held steady or improved year on year as brands with well-run programmes compound the value of their lists while paying the same flat platform fees.
44% of marketing professionals name email as their single most effective marketing channel, a higher percentage than any other channel. Social media and paid search are tied for second place at 16% each. The channel that is supposedly dying is the one nearly half of professional marketers say works better than everything else.
There are currently 4.6 billion email users worldwide, a number that is projected to reach 4.8 billion by 2027. 88% of those users check their email multiple times per day. For comparison, the average TikTok user opens the app once or twice daily, and only a fraction of the accounts they follow appear in their feed on any given day.
Email reaches 100% of your subscribers every time you send. Social media reaches 2 to 10% of your followers on a good day, subject to an algorithm you do not control and cannot predict.
Why Email Is Getting More Valuable, Not Less
The context of 2025 and 2026 makes the case for email stronger than at any previous point in ecommerce history.
Customer acquisition costs are at all-time highs. Meta's median CPA across DTC brands hit $38.17 in 2025, and it has been rising consistently for years. iOS privacy changes reduced signal quality for paid platforms. Competition for ad inventory has increased as more brands shifted online. The result is that acquiring a new customer through paid channels is more expensive than it has ever been.
This makes the owned channel, your email list, more valuable than it has ever been. A customer on your list is a customer you can reach directly, at effectively zero marginal cost, without competing in an auction, without algorithm risk, and without a platform that can change its rules overnight.
Third-party data is less reliable than ever. The post-iOS14 world fundamentally changed paid media attribution. Retargeting accuracy declined. Lookalike audiences became less precise. Brands that built their growth strategy entirely on paid acquisition discovered that the foundation was more fragile than they had assumed.
Email is first-party data. Your list belongs to you. The engagement signals in your Klaviyo account belong to you. No platform change, no privacy update, and no algorithm shift can take away your relationship with the people on your list. That ownership is increasingly rare in digital marketing, and increasingly valuable.
DTC competition has intensified dramatically. More brands than ever are selling direct to consumer, competing for attention across the same paid channels. Standing out in a Meta feed is harder and more expensive than it was three years ago. Standing out in an inbox, through a relationship built on consistent, relevant, personalised communication, is a more durable competitive advantage.
The brands winning in DTC right now are not the ones spending the most on ads. They are the ones with the best retention systems. And email is the foundation of every retention system that works at scale.
What Has Changed About Email in 2026
Email has not stayed static. The channel has evolved significantly, and brands that are running the same programme they built in 2020 are leaving performance on the table.
Personalisation has moved from nice-to-have to essential. The average inbox in 2025 is more crowded than at any point in history. Generic batch-and-blast emails, the same message sent to your entire list regardless of behaviour, purchase history, or lifecycle stage, are performing worse than ever. The brands achieving open rates above 40% and click rates above 4% are doing it through genuine relevance, emails that feel like they were written for the specific person receiving them, not a broadcast to a mass audience.
Automated flows now account for a disproportionate share of revenue. According to Klaviyo's 2026 benchmark data, automated flows generate 41% of total email revenue from just 5.3% of total sends. Revenue per recipient from a flow email is nearly 18 times higher than from a campaign email. The shift toward sophisticated, behaviour-triggered automation is the most significant evolution in email marketing over the past three years, and it is still underutilised by the majority of brands.
SMS integration has changed how flows perform. Brands that treat email and SMS as a single integrated channel rather than two separate programmes are seeing meaningfully better results on high-intent flows. An abandoned cart sequence that sends an email first, followed by an SMS if there is no conversion, followed by a second email, outperforms either channel running independently. This integration is now standard practice for top-performing DTC brands and still absent from the majority of mid-market ecommerce businesses.
Deliverability requirements have tightened. Gmail and other major email providers have raised the bar for bulk senders in 2024 and 2025. Proper domain authentication, consistent list hygiene, and low spam complaint rates are now requirements rather than best practices. Brands with poor list health are seeing inbox placement rates decline, which directly suppresses open rates and revenue regardless of how good the content is. The technical foundation of email marketing matters more in 2026 than it ever has.
The Brands Saying Email Does Not Work Are Usually Doing It Wrong
When a founder says email marketing has not worked for their brand, the conversation almost always reveals one of the same underlying issues.
They are emailing their entire list with the same message. They have a welcome series that was built once and has not been touched in 18 months. Their abandoned cart flow is a single email that fires at a fixed time every day. They have no post-purchase sequence beyond an order confirmation. Their list has thousands of disengaged subscribers dragging down their deliverability and their metrics.
None of these are evidence that email does not work. They are evidence that the programme was not built properly. The distinction matters because the conclusion you draw determines the action you take. A founder who concludes "email does not work" stops investing in the channel. A founder who concludes "our email programme needs to be built properly" fixes the system and starts generating the returns the channel is capable of delivering.
At Retain Marketing, the brands that come to us saying email has not worked for them consistently see results within the first 60 days that contradict everything they believed about the channel. A UK ecommerce business that had been managing email in-house for two years, believing their programme was performing adequately, generated £50,000 in email revenue within 90 days of working with us. The list was the same. The products were the same. The system was different.
A US brand that had seen flat performance from their automated flows for months watched those same flows generate 396% growth after we rebuilt the architecture. Again, same list. Same products. Different system.
Email was not broken for either of these brands. Their email programme was.
The One Thing That Has Not Changed
Through every platform shift, every privacy update, every algorithm change, and every new channel claiming to replace it, one thing about email has remained constant.
You own the list. Nobody can take it from you. No platform change removes it. No ad cost increase prices you out of it. No algorithm decides who sees your message and who does not.
In a digital marketing landscape that has become increasingly dependent on rented audiences and third-party platforms, that ownership is the most durable competitive advantage available to a DTC brand. And the brands that treat their email list as the asset it is, building it properly, managing it carefully, and investing in the system to maximise its return, are the ones compounding their revenue in ways that brands relying purely on paid acquisition simply cannot match.
The Bottom Line
Email marketing is not just still effective in 2025 and 2026. It is more effective than it has ever been, for brands that build and manage their programme properly.
The channel returns $36 to $45 for every $1 spent. It reaches 100% of your subscribers without algorithm interference. It operates on a cost model that does not scale with volume. And it builds the kind of direct customer relationship that paid channels cannot replicate at any price.
If email is not working for your brand, the channel is not the problem. The system is.
Book a 15-minute call with Retain Marketing and we will tell you exactly what your email programme is missing and what fixing it is worth in monthly revenue for your brand.
