Nobody gets excited about email in a strategy meeting. It doesn’t have the visual appeal of a video campaign or the immediacy of a social post going well. But I’ll take email over almost any other channel for one simple reason: it’s the only major marketing channel a business genuinely owns. Your Instagram following belongs to Instagram’s algorithm. Your Google ranking belongs to Google’s next update. Your email list belongs to you, in a spreadsheet or a CRM, with no platform standing between you and the person who gave you permission to talk to them.
The numbers back up why that matters. The DMA’s own tracking, now in its tenth year, puts email’s return on investment at £38.33 for every £1 spent, up from £29.64 just five years earlier (DMA, 2021). Their more recent benchmarking work shows the fundamentals still holding up well: delivery rates sitting at 98%, open rates climbing to 35.9%, and click rates rising for the third year running to 2.3% (DMA Email Benchmarking Report, 2025). None of those figures screams “cutting edge”, and that’s rather the point. Email is a mature, boring, extremely reliable channel, and mature and boring is exactly what a marketing budget under pressure needs.
Why do the fundamentals of email marketing still work?
Part of what makes email durable is that it doesn’t depend on an algorithm deciding your content is worth showing to people. If someone’s given you their email address, you can reach them directly, on a schedule you control, without paying a platform for the privilege each time. That’s a genuinely different economic model to social media or paid search, where the cost of reaching your own audience tends to rise every year.
The other part is that email rewards exactly the kind of specific, well-targeted content that a lot of other channels punish. A broad social post has to work for everyone scrolling past it. An email to a segmented list only has to work for the people on that list. If you know that a third of your contacts enquired about one particular service, you can write to that third specifically, rather than trying to write something generic enough to cover everyone. That’s not a technical trick, it’s just paying attention to who’s actually on your list.
The bit most business owners get wrong: consent
Here’s where I’d steer UK business owners away from treating email as simple, because legally, it isn’t quite as freewheeling as people assume. The rules sit in PECR (the Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations), not just UK GDPR, and the ICO is clear that you generally need consent before emailing an individual, unless you can meet the conditions of what’s called the “soft opt-in”, where someone bought from you recently, you gave them a clear chance to opt out at the time, and you’re only marketing similar products or services (ICO, PECR electronic mail marketing guidance).
There’s a nuance that catches a lot of B2B businesses out too. Emailing a generic address like info@company.co.uk with no named individual attached generally falls outside PECR’s consent requirement, because it’s treated as marketing to a corporate subscriber rather than an individual. Email a named person, john@company.co.uk, and you’re back in individual consent territory, even in a B2B context (ICO, marketing and data protection in detail). It’s a small distinction with real practical consequences for how a client’s list gets built and used, and it’s exactly the kind of thing that’s easy to get wrong if nobody flags it early.
Where email actually sits in the marketing mix
I wouldn’t treat email as a growth channel in the way you’d think about paid search or SEO. It’s not brilliant at finding new people who’ve never heard of you. What it’s genuinely excellent at is keeping the relationship going with people who already have, turning a one-off enquiry into a returning client, and staying front of mind between the moments someone actually needs what you offer. For a professional services business in particular, where the sales cycle is long and trust matters more than impulse, that ongoing presence is worth more than most single campaigns will ever be.
The mistake I see most often isn’t businesses ignoring email, it’s businesses treating it as an afterthought, a monthly newsletter sent without much thought to segmentation or purpose. Given the ROI the DMA’s own data shows, that’s a channel being seriously underused. Get the consent basics right, be genuinely useful rather than purely promotional, and email will quietly outperform almost everything else in your marketing mix without ever needing to be the exciting part of the strategy.
ZenithSpark has been in the email marketing and email content business for over 15 years. Rich Jarrott has written everything from legal affairs newsletters for a chamber of commerce to customer emails for a lingerie company. If you want to discuss how we can help you build compelling stories for your contacts, get in touch.
Sources:
DMA, Marketer Email Tracker 2021
DMA, Email Benchmarking Report 2025
ICO, Guide to PECR: electronic mail marketing
ICO, Marketing and data protection in detail