€1 Spent on Email = €36. €1 Spent on Instagram = €0.30

One dollar spent on email marketing returns thirty-six dollars. Same dollar, spent on a Meta ad campaign, returns somewhere between two and four dollars gross — and after cost of goods, returns net cents. The number gets repeated until it stops sounding real, so let me walk it through carefully, including the parts the email-versus-social arguments usually leave out. The 36x gap is real. It is also conditional. The conditions are the whole point.

This is the headline version of an argument we make in operator detail in the email list playbook. The summary is the math below. The implications are what change how you spend the next ninety days.

The 36-to-1 number, sourced

Litmus, the email-deliverability and analytics platform that publishes one of the most-cited industry benchmark reports, puts the figure at thirty-six dollars in revenue per one dollar spent on email marketing, averaged across the segments they measure. The DMA (Data and Marketing Association) UK reports a similar number on their own samples, landing in the high thirties to low forties depending on the year. Klaviyo, focused mostly on ecommerce email, publishes operator-level numbers that often run higher in that vertical because ecommerce has a near-instant feedback loop between an email send and a purchase.

Average across the credible sources you have $36 per $1, and the variance is "thirty in B2B, forty in B2C, fifty-plus in ecommerce." That is what the industry headline is built on. It is not invented.

Email returns roughly thirty-six dollars per one dollar spent. The number is annoyingly well-sourced.

The other side, sourced honestly

Now Meta Ads. Industry benchmarks for Meta Ads ROAS (return on ad spend) in 2025-2026 sit between 2x and 4x for most consumer verticals — meaning a dollar of ad spend produces between two and four dollars of attributable revenue. Top-decile ecommerce campaigns hit 5x or 6x. Top-of-funnel cold-acquisition campaigns hit closer to 1.5x, sometimes break-even or below. That is gross revenue, before cost of goods.

After cost of goods, the math goes flat fast. A dollar of ad spend on a 3x ROAS campaign with a 30 percent gross margin produces ninety cents of contribution margin. After agency fees, creative production, attribution leakage, and the fact that Apple's iOS privacy changes have made paid social attribution roughly 20-30 percent less accurate since 2021, the actual contribution from a typical Meta ad dollar in 2026 is closer to twenty to forty cents net.

Email is sending a message to people who already know who you are, on a channel where you control the timing and the targeting. Meta is buying impressions in front of strangers who have not yet decided they want anything from you. The two activities are doing fundamentally different jobs. The ROI gap between them is a function of that difference, not of one channel being magic.

Email returns thirty-six dollars per dollar. Meta returns thirty to forty cents net per dollar. Both numbers are true. They measure different things.

The catch nobody puts in the headline

The 36-to-1 ratio assumes you already have an email list. That is the whole catch.

Email's incremental cost per send is somewhere between zero and a fraction of a cent. The cost is in acquiring the subscriber in the first place. Industry benchmarks for cost per email subscriber acquired through paid social campaigns in 2026 run between three and ten dollars per subscriber for a niche-targeted campaign in a consumer vertical, and ten to forty dollars per subscriber for B2B.

If you take the worst-case version of that — let us say it costs you eight dollars in Meta ad spend to acquire one new email subscriber — then your real funnel ROI is the email subscriber's lifetime value divided by that acquisition cost. A creator-economy email subscriber worth one to four dollars per month, kept on the list for an average of twelve to twenty-four months, generates somewhere between twelve and ninety-six dollars in revenue over their life on the list. Divide by the eight-dollar acquisition cost and your real funnel ROI is between 1.5x and 12x.

That is the honest number. Not thirty-six. The thirty-six number works only after the acquisition is sunk cost. The acquisition is not free.

Email ROI is enormous once the list exists. Building the list is the part where the cost lives.

What this implies about where the next hour goes

The conclusion is not "email is better than paid social." The conclusion is that they are not competitors. They do different jobs.

Paid social acquires. It is the only channel at scale that reliably puts your offer in front of people who do not know you yet. The cost per impression is what it is, and the conversion math is brutal but real.

Email monetizes. It is the channel where the lifetime value gets compounded out, where the second sale happens, where the upsell happens, where the brand relationship becomes a financial relationship over months and years.

A creator or business using only paid social is paying retail to acquire every customer, every time. They never compound a customer's lifetime value because they never reach the customer a second time except by paying for the impression again. A creator using only email never grows because they have no acquisition engine. A creator running both — paid social as the front door, email as the relationship layer — is doing the only version of this math that scales.

The right reading of the 36-to-1 number is: every dollar you spend on email is amortizing the dollar you already spent on acquiring that subscriber. The bigger your list, and the longer subscribers stay engaged, the more times that amortization compounds. That is the asset most creator and small-business plans underweight.

Paid social is the acquisition channel. Email is the monetization channel. Use them sequentially, not as alternatives.

What to do this week

If you do not have an email list yet, you are running a paid-social campaign with no monetization back-end. The next dollar of ad spend has nowhere to compound. Start one. A single lead-magnet opt-in form on the landing page your ads point to is the smallest viable version, and it triples the LTV per acquired user inside thirty days for most operators we have watched.

The full sequencing — what list to build, what lead magnet to use, what cadence to send, what to monetize first — lives in the email list playbook. The deeper version of the ROI argument with cohort caveats is in the email vs social ROI breakdown. If a quiz funnel is the lead-magnet shape you want, that is what Snacked is for.