Email ROI ~$36 per $1 spent — Litmus / DMA Marketer Email Tracker

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).

Source: Litmus + DMA Marketer Email Tracker.

Caveat: Litmus is an email-marketing software vendor; DMA is a marketing-industry association. Incentive to inflate email ROI. Quarantined as directional.

Confidence: Industry-consensus (the ROI ordering — email > most channels — is widely cited).

Why this matters for Candid: Email sits in the owned/earned digital bucket (Gartner 2025 — digital channel allocations: SEO 8.9%, Email 7.4%, etc. — 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 mapping — three tiers of work for three sizes of gap (June 2026).