Industry body · DMA (Data & Marketing Association)
UK Email Marketing ROI 2026: £41 for Every £1 Spent
The DMA's Marketer Email Tracker 2026, surveying 250 UK marketers, puts email marketing ROI at £41 for every £1 spent, up from £38 in the previous tracker. The companion Email Benchmarking Report 2025, drawing on 442 billion emails sent in 2024 across seven UK ESPs, records average delivery at 98% and open rates at 35.9%. Email remains the highest-ROI digital channel for UK businesses by a wide margin.
Source published Summarised
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Key findings at a glance
- £41 UK email marketing ROI per £1 spent in the DMA Marketer Email Tracker 2026, the headline figure for the latest tracker year.
- £38 ROI per £1 in the previous DMA Marketer Email Tracker, establishing the year-on-year uplift that lands email at £41.
- 442 billion Emails sent in 2024 and analysed for the DMA Email Benchmarking Report 2025, the largest comparable UK dataset on email performance.
- 7 UK email service providers contributing anonymised performance data to the 2025 benchmarking dataset, giving the figures broad sector coverage.
- 35.9% Average UK open rate in 2024, the third consecutive annual rise post Apple Mail Privacy Protection's 2022 reset.
- 2.3% Average UK unique click rate in 2024, also the third year-on-year increase and an encouraging signal given rising send volumes.
- 98% Average UK delivery rate across all senders in the 2025 benchmark, with B2C reaching 99.2%.
- 250 UK marketers surveyed for the DMA Marketer Email Tracker 2026, the qualitative complement to the benchmarking dataset.
- 44% UK marketers reporting they now use AI for email copy generation or template assembly in 2026.
- 54% Share citing discounts as the most effective email subscription driver, up 18 percentage points since 2021.
What the report covers
The DMA's annual Marketer Email Tracker and its companion Email Benchmarking Report are the two most cited reference datasets for the UK email channel. The 2026 tracker, sponsored by ActionRocket and launched in March 2026, surveys 250 UK marketers on how they plan, run and measure email programmes. The 2025 benchmarking report, published by the DMA's Email Council Research Hub, aggregates anonymised performance data from seven of the UK's largest email service providers covering 442 billion emails sent in 2024.
Together they answer two distinct questions. The tracker tells us what UK marketers spend, what they earn back and how they feel about the channel. The benchmark tells us what the underlying engagement numbers actually do at scale, free of self-reporting bias. Both have been published annually since the mid-2000s, which makes longitudinal comparisons defensible, and both use methodology consistent enough to support year-on-year reading. The combined dataset is the closest thing UK marketers have to a regulated industry benchmark for the channel.
The 2026 headline reading is unambiguous. Email ROI has continued to rise rather than plateau, despite Apple Mail Privacy Protection, despite GDPR-era list contraction and despite a record volume of sends. Delivery, opens and clicks are all moving in the right direction, and the qualitative survey shows marketers are leaning further into the channel rather than diversifying away from it. The data does not support any version of an "email is dying" narrative.
What this means for UK marketers
For UK businesses planning their 2026 channel mix, the practical takeaway is that email is still the highest-leverage digital channel available on a like-for-like cost basis. A £41 return per £1 spent is several multiples of paid social or display, and the gap has widened rather than narrowed against those channels over the past three years. Brands cutting email investment to fund paid media expansion are, on these figures, moving budget in the wrong direction.
There are three practical implications worth acting on. First, the deliverability foundation is now the lever with the largest ROI sensitivity. A 98% UK average delivery rate is the baseline, not the ceiling, and the brands hitting 99%+ are the ones running authenticated sending (SPF, DKIM, DMARC at p=reject), maintaining list hygiene with active sunset policies, and segmenting away cold subscribers before they damage sender reputation. We treat this as table stakes on every UK digital marketing programme, and the data suggests it is still the single biggest source of ROI variance between brands of similar size.
Second, the AI usage figure (44% of UK marketers now generating copy or templates with AI) is one of the fastest-moving inputs in the dataset. The brands seeing AI lift their numbers rather than dilute them are the ones using it for variant generation, subject-line testing and segmentation summaries, not for first-draft content shipped without editorial. A reasonable working test: would the email read as authentically written if the recipient knew it was AI-assembled? If not, the time saved is being repaid in engagement decay.
Third, the 54% discount-as-acquisition-driver finding (up 18 percentage points since 2021) lines up uncomfortably well with the 79% of UK adults reporting cost-of-living rises in April 2026. For B2C brands, the recommendation is not to chase discount depth but to make the first-email value exchange explicit. A clearly framed welcome offer with a fixed expiry tends to outperform an open-ended "10% off your first order" on both opt-in rate and 90-day LTV, and it protects margin during a price-sensitive consumer cycle.
The one caveat worth flagging is that aggregate ROI figures wash out a wide variance by segment. B2B professional services and SaaS programmes routinely benchmark above the headline. High-volume B2C retail with short customer cycles tends to land below. Treat £41 as the UK directional reading, not a target, and benchmark internally against your own prior 12 months rather than against an industry-wide aggregate.
How they got the data
The DMA Marketer Email Tracker 2026 surveyed 250 UK marketers across B2B, B2C, agency and in-house roles. Fieldwork ran in early 2026 and the report was launched on 25 March 2026. The qualitative dataset covers programme budgets, channel ROI, AI usage, segmentation maturity and team structure. The tracker has been published annually for over a decade, with methodology kept consistent enough to support year-on-year comparison.
The Email Benchmarking Report 2025 aggregates anonymised delivery, open, click, bounce and complaint data from seven of the UK's leading email service providers, covering more than 442 billion sends in 2024 across B2B and B2C senders and multiple industry sectors. Each provider contributes raw performance data, the DMA's Email Council Research Hub aggregates it, and extreme outliers are removed before publication to keep year-on-year trend lines stable. Both reports use sample sizes well above what is needed for stable national point estimates, but smaller cuts (by industry vertical or company size) should be treated as directional rather than authoritative. For background on email as a discipline, see the Wikipedia entry on email marketing.
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From DMA (Data & Marketing Association) · published 25/03/2026