What the Latest Email Data Reveals About ROI, AI, and Relationships

Email is thriving, even in the AI era.

Despite more competition in the inbox, it remains one of the highest-performing channels in modern marketing. The brands seeing the biggest returns focus on strategic emails, not higher volume.

According to the State of Email 2025 report by Litmus, leading teams are shifting to a smarter, relationship-first approach using real-time data and automation. Below, we break down what the latest email benchmarks reveal and how the most innovative marketers are turning insights into results.

1. The ROI–Budget Gap

Email marketing remains one of the most efficient and high-performing channels, yet its success is often obscured by vanity metrics. Most marketing orgs lack the attribution clarity to tie email to revenue, retention, or customer lifetime value and justify continued investment with leadership.

• 35% of companies report an impressive ROI of 36:1 or higher from email marketing
• Yet 1 in 5 marketers still can’t confidently measure or prove email’s impact internally
• Brands with 30% to 40% open rates are the most likely to dedicate over 15% of their total marketing budget to email

Many teams still rely on outdated KPIs, such as open rate and click-through rate, to gauge performance. These proxies might indicate interest, but they don’t tell the full story of customer engagement or downstream impact on revenue.

How Top Performers Prove Email ROI

Modern marketing organizations are making the case for greater investment in email by:

• Integrating financial, sales, and CRM data to isolate email’s impact on revenue, subscription conversions, and retention
• Automating lifecycle marketing performance reporting to provide leadership with real-time visibility into ROI across key moments in the customer journey
• Tracking Revenue Per Email (RPE) to move beyond vanity metrics and prioritize the campaigns, journeys, and audiences driving meaningful business outcomes

By tying email to business-critical metrics, email marketing can shake off its old reputation as a “low-cost, high-frequency” channel and become the growth engine it should be.

2. AI Is Expected, but Rarely Operationalized

Despite the bold projections, most marketing teams are still stuck in manual mode, relying on batch-and-blast campaign logic that doesn’t adjust to customer behavior in real time. 

• 89% of marketers anticipate that 75% of their marketing operations will be AI-driven by 2026
• Yet today, only 31% of teams use AI for Send-Time Optimization (STO)—one of the most accessible applications of marketing AI

Without AI-driven optimization, marketers are forced to make decisions based on past performance or intuition. And teams spend more time building emails than they do analyzing impact.

How AI-Driven Email Marketing Teams Are Gaining an Edge

Here’s what the best teams do differently to improve email ROI and deepen customer relationships.

• Automating Send-Time Optimization (STO): Instead of guessing when users will engage, AI pinpoints each customer’s optimal engagement window and schedules accordingly. More emails land at the right time, and more get opened.
• Using Generative AI to Scale Content Creation: AI-assisted tools generate content variants for different audiences or lifecycle stages, so teams can spend less time writing and more time refining journeys that convert.
• Applying Predictive Modeling for Churn Prevention: By analyzing behavioral signals and engagement patterns, AI can flag at-risk users and trigger re-engagement flows before they ghost your brand.

When AI is applied thoughtfully, it shifts effort away from manual setup and guesswork. Automating timing, prioritization, and optimization gives teams room to focus on strategy, experimentation, and what actually moves results.

3. Accessibility Is Now an Operational Requirement

Accessibility in email has quietly shifted from a best practice to a baseline expectation — and in 2025, it became a legal one.

The European Accessibility Act (EAA) went into effect in June 2025, mandating digital accessibility for products and services across the EU. Yet despite this regulatory shift, only 47% of brands currently use even basic accessibility features, like alt text, in their emails.

In fast-moving, high-volume marketing programs, inaccessible content can add up quickly. Each broken image or missing label creates friction that damages trust and hurts performance, especially for users who rely on screen readers or assistive technology. Accessibility is no longer just a design issue. It’s now a matter of legal compliance and long-term brand trust.

What Leading Email Marketing Teams Are Doing to Ensure Accessibility at Scale

Here’s how smart teams are building inclusive email programs that scale:

• Embedding accessibility into design systems and master templates: Instead of retrofitting compliance into individual campaigns, teams are building accessibility into the core components of every email — headers, images, buttons, and structure — so every send meets the bar by default.
• Standardizing semantic HTML (H1, H2, alt text, ARIA labels): Proper heading hierarchy and descriptive markup ensure that content is readable and navigable for assistive technologies, especially in modular or dynamic email layouts.
• Prioritizing audits of high-volume flows: Welcome sequences, transactional messages, and post-purchase touchpoints are often the highest trafficked—but also the most overlooked. Leading brands are auditing and remediating these first to reduce exposure and quickly improve baseline accessibility.
• Training cross-functional teams: Designers, marketers, developers, and content creators all play a role in accessibility. The best-performing organizations treat accessibility as a shared responsibility across the email lifecycle.

Beyond compliance, accessibility improves performance. Accessible emails load better, read better, and convert better, especially on mobile devices or in fragmented inbox environments.

4. Relationship-First Content Drives Higher Lifetime Value

In an inbox flooded with urgency tactics and limited-time offers, generic campaigns blur together. Customers today expect more. They want emails that speak directly to where they are on their journey. And when brands show up consistently with relevant, helpful messaging, customers reward them with increased lifetime value (LTV).

That dynamic helps explain why 1 in 5 marketers report their highest email marketing ROI comes from customer engagement and education emails, which consistently outperform short-term promotional campaigns over time. 

Value-driven content works. Promotional emails still have a role, but overusing them trains customers to disengage.

How Relationship-First Email Marketing Drives Long-Term Loyalty

Here’s how high-performing email marketing teams are building flexible lifecycle journeys that grow with the customer:

• Designing adaptive journeys that blend newsletters and behavior-triggered content: Instead of forcing all messages through scheduled blasts, these teams balance evergreen engagement with real-time touchpoints—ensuring emails are always relevant, never redundant.
• Rethinking welcome sequences as trust-building moments: Instead of “Buy Now” CTAs in the first email, relationship-first brands use welcome flows to educate users on the product, brand values, and how to get the most out of the experience. This sets customers up for long-term engagement, not one-time conversion.
• Triggering content based on real customer behavior: Whether it’s browsing a specific category, abandoning a cart, or completing a milestone, these teams send emails that match what each person needs. The result? Higher engagement, reduced churn, and stronger revenue over time.

By designing every touchpoint to educate, inspire, or support, marketers build brand equity that translates into higher purchase frequency and stronger retention.

Email’s Future Is Confident, Adaptive, and Outcome-Led

Email continues to be one of the most reliable channels for driving engagement and revenue, but its effectiveness increasingly depends on how it’s run. The data points in one direction: programs perform better when teams measure impact beyond surface metrics, apply automation to timing and decision-making, and design messages that earn trust over time. As customer journeys become more fragmented, those same disciplines can’t stop at the inbox — they need to carry across every touchpoint where brands show up.

To go deeper on the best practices that support effective email engagement, explore Email Deliverability 101: How to Reach the Inbox Every Time.