Yes. Email is consistently the highest-returning marketing channel, averaging around £36 back for every £1 spent, because you own the list instead of renting reach from a platform. It is worth it if you can send something genuinely useful on a regular basis. It is not worth it if you have no list, nothing to say, or no time to say it.
Email's reputation for return is not marketing folklore. Litmus puts the average return at £36 for every £1 spent, higher than any other channel they track. The UK's DMA Email Benchmarking Report 2025, drawing on data from seven leading email service providers, found delivery rates of 98% in 2024, average open rates of 35.9% and click rates rising for the third year in a row. AWeber's research adds that 79% of small businesses call email important to their strategy, and that small business owners credit email with driving sales at roughly twice the rate of any other channel. That is why email marketing keeps topping the return tables.
There are now more than 4.5 billion email users worldwide. Whatever the social platform of the moment is, almost every one of your customers still has an inbox and checks it daily.
Your social media following lives on someone else's platform. The platform decides how many of your own followers see a post, and that number has been shrinking for years as feeds get more crowded and more pay-to-play. One algorithm change can halve your reach overnight, and there is nothing to appeal to.
Your email list is yours. When you send, you reach the people who asked to hear from you, directly, for pennies. Nobody takes a cut of the audience you built. That is the whole argument in one paragraph: email is the one marketing channel where the asset belongs to you. No other part of your marketing strategy works that way.
For most small businesses, email is not about blasting offers. It earns its keep in quieter ways:
Your click-through rate on each send is the honest measure: it tells you whether people act on what you send, not just open it.
Less than almost anything else you can do. Most email platforms are free or a few pounds a month for a small list, rising to tens of pounds as the list grows into the thousands. The real cost is time: an hour or two a month to write something worth reading. If you send our kind of email, one genuinely useful idea rather than a newsletter full of news about yourself, that hour is the best-spent marketing time most small businesses have.
That is email marketing compounding: each send makes the next one more valuable. Useful email campaigns beat frequent promotions.
Be honest with yourself on three counts. If you have no list and no way to build one, there is nobody to email yet; start collecting first. An email list of fifty people who asked to hear from you beats five thousand bought addresses. If you cannot find an hour a month, a half-hearted newsletter does more harm than none. And if your emails would only ever be promotions, expect list fatigue and unsubscribes rather than returns.
Often enough to stay remembered, not so often you become noise. Monthly is a solid default for most small businesses; weekly works if every email is genuinely useful. Whatever you choose, keep the rhythm, because irregular bursts train people to ignore you.
They do different jobs, but email usually delivers more per hour spent because you own the audience and reach it directly. Social media is good for being discovered; email is good for staying chosen. Most small businesses do best with email as the backbone and social feeding new people into it.
The software is free or a few pounds a month for a small list, and typically tens of pounds a month as your list grows into the thousands. The main investment is the time to write something worth reading, roughly an hour or two a month for a simple, useful email.
Yes. UK marketing rules (PECR, backed by UK GDPR) mean you need consent or a clear soft opt-in from an existing customer relationship, every email must identify you, and every email must include a working unsubscribe. Buying lists of strangers is the quickest way to get your emails marked as spam.
Answer the questions customers ask you every week. One useful idea, tip or explanation per email, written plainly, beats a round-up of company news. If a reader finishes your email knowing something useful, they will open the next one. Subject lines matter less than that reputation; people open emails from senders who have earned it.
Sources checked 23 October 2026. Figures and guidance are typical ranges, not promises; your market and circumstances decide what applies.
