In Constant Contact’s Small Business Now report, published in September 2025, 44% of small and midsize businesses named email their most effective marketing channel, up from 23% the year before. The share doubled in twelve months. Most owners we talk to have a customer list sitting in a point-of-sale system that has never been sent anything.
Three of the sources below have something to sell. Constant Contact sells email software, Omnisend (whose benchmarks carry most of this post) sells email software, and we sell email work. Weigh the individual percentages accordingly. The direction across separate datasets is harder to wave off.
The doubling, and the likely reason for it
Constant Contact’s survey does not explain the jump, so what follows is our reading.
The same report found that 42% of small and midsize businesses have less than one hour a day to spend on marketing, and that their single biggest frustration is not knowing what is working. Email answers that complaint. You know who you sent to, who clicked, and who called the shop that afternoon.
The sample: 2,500 small business decision-makers across Australia, Canada, the UK and the US, fielded by Ascend2 Research in June 2025. Not a US-only picture.
The gap between an automated send and a broadcast
Omnisend’s 2026 benchmark study put automated emails at $3.41 in revenue per email sent, against $0.155 for a broadcast campaign email. Conversion was 1.49% for automated sends and 0.08% for campaigns. Omnisend puts the gap at about twenty-two times the revenue per message sent.
A broadcast goes out Tuesday because it is Tuesday. An automation goes out because a customer did something: booked a job, filled in a form, went quiet for six months. Same list, same software. One arrives while the customer is already thinking about you.
That data covers more than 20 billion campaign emails and 470 million automated sends across more than 27,000 brands, and it leans heavily toward ecommerce. If you install furnaces or do taxes, read it as direction, not a target.
The welcome email almost nobody has set up
In that same Omnisend dataset, welcome emails generated $6.16 per email sent at a 35.53% open rate. Back-in-stock emails did better still, $9.14 per email and 6.72% conversion, the strongest of any automation type, and they were running at just 0.6% of brands. The most widely adopted automation was abandoned cart, at 22.5% of brands.
Adoption does not follow return: the strongest numbers belong to the automation almost nobody runs.
Back-in-stock and abandoned cart mostly do not apply to a service business. A welcome sequence does, and it fires at the one moment you can count on having somebody’s attention: they just chose you and are wondering whether they chose well.
What normal looks like, and why open rates lie now
Omnisend’s 2026 baseline across ecommerce campaigns is a 30.22% average open rate, 0.88% click-through rate, 2.91% click-to-open rate and a 0.08% conversion rate. Ecommerce-skewed again, so treat them as a rough shape, not your scorecard.
The open rate in that list needs a warning label, and Omnisend supplies it: open rates are inflated by Apple Mail Privacy Protection.
In plain words: when someone reads mail in Apple Mail with that setting on, Apple’s servers download every image in your message first, including the invisible one-pixel image your software uses to count opens. Your dashboard records an open even if the customer swiped the notification away. An open rate in 2026 is partly a count of Apple’s machines.
So measure what a human hand has to do. Click-through, 0.88% in Omnisend’s baseline, means a finger landed on a link. Click-to-open, 2.91%, tells you whether the message was worth acting on among people who got that far. The number that pays your bills is on neither list: calls and replies in the two days after a send. Put a question in the email that someone can answer by hitting reply.
What the ROI numbers say, and which one is six years old
Litmus surveyed nearly 500 marketing professionals worldwide for its 2025 State of Email research. 35% report getting $10 to $36 back per $1 spent on email, 30% report $36 to $50, and 5% report more than $50. Another 21% do not measure email ROI at all, down from 36% in 2023.
Those are marketers grading their own work, not audited returns.
Now the figure you have seen a hundred times. “$36 back for every $1 spent,” and its cousins at $42 and $45, comes from Litmus’s own 2020 State of Email Survey, and Litmus’s current ROI page still derives from it. The even more heavily quoted “email marketing ROI is 38 to 1” comes from a Litmus press release published in 2018. Both still get recycled as current in 2026 marketing content. If a number in a pitch has no year attached, ask for one.
Three automations, in build order
Read the next three sections with two things in mind. Omnisend’s categories are ecommerce categories, so adapting them to a service business is our reasoning, not measurement. And permission comes before any of it: you may only email people who gave you their address for the purpose of hearing from you, and US marketing email rules require a working unsubscribe link and a real physical mailing address in the footer. That is a plain description rather than a legal statement, and a specific question belongs with an attorney.
One: the welcome sequence
Trigger: a new address enters your list because someone booked, bought, or filled in a form.
Timing: the first email inside an hour, the second on day three, the third on day seven. Then it stops.
What it says: the first confirms what happens next and gives them a name and a direct phone number. The second answers the question you get asked on every job. The third is the only one that asks for anything, and it asks small.
Two: the post-job follow-up that also asks for a review
Trigger: a job marked complete in your scheduling software, or ticked off on a paper calendar.
Timing: two days after the work is done.
What it says: thank them by name for the specific job, not “your recent service.” One line about what to watch for or when to call you. Then the review link, with an easy out. This one arrives when the customer’s opinion of you is at its highest, the same property that makes welcome emails work in Omnisend’s data.
Three: dormant customer reactivation
Trigger: no job, no purchase, no contact inside a window that fits your trade. Six months for HVAC. Twelve to eighteen for a roofer.
Timing: one email when the window closes, one more two weeks later if nobody clicked. Then drop them to a quarterly note.
What it says: no discount in the first one. Tell them what you last did and when. “We put in your water heater in March 2024, and the anode rod is worth a look around year six.” The second email can carry an offer if you want one.
Build the first, get it running, then start the second. All three at once ends up half-finished in a browser tab.
The list you already have and are not using
Export it: point-of-sale, invoicing software, or the spreadsheet on the office computer. Names and email addresses, one row each.
You almost certainly already pay for the software that can send to it. The US Chamber of Commerce Technology Engagement Center, with Teneo Research surveyed 3,870 US small businesses with fewer than 250 employees online in June 2025, a trade association study rather than a vendor’s and the largest sample in this post. It found 58% use four or more technology platforms, and that marketing and promotions is the most common use of technology at 46%, ahead of payroll at 44% and accounting at 42%. So for most owners a welcome sequence is a setting inside a tool already on the bank statement.
Then check the list. Someone who handed over an address for a receipt did not necessarily hand it over to hear from you monthly, so the first message has to say who you are and why they are getting it. If you are unsure about a batch of addresses, leave them out.
Set against that 42% with under an hour a day, the arithmetic here is unusual. A welcome sequence takes one to three hours to build and then runs for years untouched. Very little else you can do in an afternoon is still paying you in March.
Handled well, none of this is visible from the outside. A welcome email goes out at eleven on a Saturday night to somebody who booked from the couch, and nobody on your team touched it. Once a month somebody checks clicks and replies instead of open rates. Everyone on that list already trusted you with their money once, and looking after them is the cheapest thing on your list.
So start with the export. Pull names and addresses out of your point-of-sale or invoicing software into one file and count the rows. If the count is in the hundreds, build the welcome sequence next: one trigger, three emails, then leave it alone. If it is in the dozens, spend the same afternoon working out how you will collect addresses at the counter. Either way the afternoon is the whole cost. When it is the afternoon that never comes, that is what we do at UpLift Digital.