Does email marketing really return 40 dollars or every dollar spent?
When people say that email marketing returns 1 spent, does that include the cost of acquiring the email list in the first place e.g buying it or building it up – all the work to get the email list in the first place?
Ans: no it doesn't. so highly misleading IMO. Real RoI much lower though still positive.
See this output (i checked some of the links and their content and seemed reasonably accurate).
The oft-cited claim that email marketing returns ~1 spent is based on surveys that count direct email campaign costs (software, sending, creative, labor) but typically exclude upstream costs such as lead acquisition, content marketing, paid ads, events, partnerships, or time spent building the list.
For example, the Data & Marketing Association (DMA) ROI estimates are based on self-reported campaign-level returns rather than fully loaded customer acquisition costs, a limitation explicitly noted in methodological discussions of these figures (DMA, Marketer Email Tracker reports; Litmus, State of Email ROI, 2019–2023).
When list-building costs are included, rigorous academic and practitioner analyses find that email still performs well, but ROI is materially lower and highly context-dependent, varying by industry, list quality, and attribution model (see Kumar et al., “Email Marketing: Impact on Customer Equity,” Journal of Marketing, 2016; Farris et al., Marketing Metrics, Pearson).
The 1 figure should therefore be treated as a campaign efficiency statistic, not a full-funnel or economic ROI.