{"id":2138,"slug":"email-roi-36-to-1-litmus-dma","title":"Email ROI ~$36 per $1 spent — Litmus / DMA Marketer Email Tracker","kind":"reference","scope":"business","status":"current","audiences":["kevin","candid-team"],"topics":["paid-vs-owned-digital-split","smb-seo-budget-norms"],"reference_body":"**Claim:** Email's return is cited at \"**$36 for every dollar spent, higher than any other channel**\" (Litmus State of Email, corroborated by the DMA Marketer Email Tracker).\n\n**Source:** Litmus + DMA Marketer Email Tracker.\n\n**Caveat:** Litmus is an email-marketing software vendor; DMA is a marketing-industry association. Incentive to inflate email ROI. Quarantined as directional.\n\n**Confidence:** Industry-consensus (the ROI ordering — email > most channels — is widely cited).\n\n**Why this matters for Candid:** Email sits in the owned/earned digital bucket ([[gartner-2025-digital-channel-allocations]] — 7.4% of digital). Highest ROI of the owned levers, durable vs rented paid attention. Important context for recommending Tier 2 work in sister brief [[research-brief-smb-widget-difficulty-to-work-june-2026]].","rationale_body":null,"metadata":null,"links":{"outgoing":[],"incoming":[{"slug":"research-brief-smb-widget-spend-benchmarks-june-2026","title":"Research brief: SMB widget spend benchmarks — feasibility of a \"digital-minus-ads\" % of revenue (June 2026)","kind":"reference","scope":"business","link_type":"relates-to"}]},"created_at":"2026-06-23T20:03:31.499Z","updated_at":"2026-06-23T20:03:31.499Z"}