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B2B email marketing is delivering big returns. Why are we treating it like a mailshot?
Email delivers £38 for every £1 spent, according to new DMA research. But with bulk sends still making up a third of all emails, B2B marketers may be leaving much of that potential untapped.
In 1908, Frederick Winslow Taylor convinced an entire generation of factory owners that efficiency was everything. The factories ran like clockwork. However, because Taylorism ignored how much of any given product customers actually wanted and focused on scientific efficiency, factories would often produce products without sufficient customer demand. So they produced things nobody wanted, very efficiently.
Email marketing in 2026 is in a similar situation.
Email marketing delivers £38.33 for every £1 spent in the UK, according to DMA UK research. That figure has grown from 30:1 to 38:1 over five years. It is, by a significant margin, the highest return of any digital marketing channel available to B2B companies operating in the UK.
The DMA's Marketer Email Tracker 2026 also found that bulk sends still account for 33 per cent of all emails sent. Segmented emails have declined from 28 per cent to 26 per cent, and dynamic content has fallen.
Automated emails are up, now accounting for 34 per cent of sends, nine percentage points higher than in 2021, but the automation is primarily replacing manual bulk sending rather than enabling genuinely personalised communication. The channel is producing extraordinary returns despite how it is being used, which suggests how much headroom remains.
Why Stem companies have room for improvement
For engineering and technology companies, the email marketing opportunity differs from that faced by consumer brands.
Contacts in an engineering, science and technology company's database are often named decision-makers at known accounts - people whose roles, sectors, and likely application areas are known quantities. The conditions for meaningful segmentation and personalisation exist to a degree that most consumer email programmes cannot match.
DMA data shows that 43 per cent of marketers identify their contacts' interests as the most commercially valuable data they possess. For a company whose database separates contacts by sector, application, or purchase history, the gap between the segmentation data available and the segmentation actually being applied to campaigns is usually significant.
Where the money is
The DMA data identifies a specific opportunity that most engineering, science and technology email programmes are not capturing. Post-purchase communication has grown 24 percentage points since 2021 as an email use case, and customer service usage has grown 22 percentage points.
This shows email is no longer primarily an acquisition channel; it is now used throughout the customer lifecycle at a rate not anticipated five years ago.
For engineering, science and technology companies with long sales cycles and high-value existing accounts, the post-purchase communication opportunity is particularly underused. A customer who has purchased a capital instrument or installed an industrial software system has ongoing needs, such as consumables, upgrades, service contracts, and adjacent applications, which email is well-placed to address. The DMA tracker found that companies treating email as a full-lifecycle channel, covering post-purchase and customer service as well as acquisition, are producing the strongest returns.
What the data requires
Most B2B email platforms offer segmentation, dynamic content, and automation capabilities that most users don't deploy. The gap is operational, because it takes time and resources to build proper segmentation logic, define behavioural triggers, and produce content variants for different audience profiles.
Ann Handley, chief content Officer at MarketingProfs, explained this well at Litmus Live 2026: “How you show up in the inbox, your pacing, your relevance, your humanity, is now the difference between being seen and being skipped.”
The DMA tracker shows the channel ceiling is high. It also shows that most programmes are operating considerably below it. For engineering, science and technology marketing managers reviewing channel performance and justifying budget allocation, email's return per pound spent is the strongest case available, provided the programme is structured to earn it rather than assume it.
Frederick Winslow Taylor's factories were very efficient. They were also, frequently, producing the wrong things very quickly. Bulk-sending email to an unsegmented database is a version of the same problem.
Richard Stone is the founder of technical PR agency Stone Junction, which is a corporate affiliate member of the CIPR.
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Further reading
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