Email’s 40:1 ROI claim gets a relationship check

Email’s famous 40:1 return makes a great budget-slide headline. Guy Hanson, who helped produce widely cited industry figures, now wants marketers to look harder at the bill—and at the subscribers who leave after each send.

In a September 18, 2026 Validity post, Hanson argues for measuring Return on Relationship alongside return on investment (ROI). The practical question is whether an email program builds repeat business over time, rather than simply extracting another purchase today.

What happened

Hanson challenges the completeness of common email ROI calculations, not email’s usefulness. He says businesses often underestimate both the total cost of running their programs and the cost of acquiring customers. Accounting for those expenses more rigorously, he suggests, could produce returns around 10:1 to 15:1—still attractive, but a different budget argument from 40:1.

That lower range is Hanson’s assessment, not a newly published industry benchmark. His post does not present a fresh survey, a sample size or a calculation establishing a replacement average. Marketers should therefore treat it as a prompt to examine their own costs, not swap one universal multiplier for another.

His proposed alternative, Return on Relationship, asks whether messages support trust and loyalty. The behaviors he names extend beyond a promotion’s immediate revenue: clicking through, visiting the website, engaging on social media, purchasing and buying again later. Those activities connect the email program to a longer customer relationship.

The argument also changes how list health gets reported. Hanson favors tracking whether a subscriber base is growing or declining over celebrating its absolute size. A large list can conceal an expensive replacement problem if each campaign drives enough people away to keep acquisition teams busy filling the gap.

The background

Hanson’s skepticism comes with an unusually relevant disclosure: he served on the Data & Marketing Association email council that produced widely repeated ROI figures from practitioners’ self-reported results. He cites familiar ratios of 36:1 and 42:1, and says the latest DMA Marketer Email Tracker puts the figure just above 40:1.

His budget test is straightforward: if email reliably returned that much, it should win internal funding competitions more often. That is an argument about how businesses evaluate investment, not proof that every reported return is wrong. For teams following email marketing, the useful distinction is between an industry talking point and a defensible program-level calculation.

The post builds on four financial measures Hanson introduced earlier in his series: Total Program Value, Average Revenue per Message, Cost per Acquisition and Subscriber Lifetime Value. Together, they connect immediate performance with the cost of adding customers and the value those customers may generate over their tenure.

Subscriber churn puts pressure on both sides of that calculation. Hanson identifies three ways addresses leave the usable audience: subscribers opt out, register spam complaints or have addresses that stop working. Replacing those subscribers creates acquisition expense; losing their potential future transactions also reduces the value of the existing base.

Validity calls its combined view of opt-outs, complaints and hard bounces the Disaffection Index. Hanson’s point is that individually small rates—typically fractions of one percent—can look less harmless when reported together. Grouping them makes the cumulative loss visible instead of scattering it across separate dashboard rows.

One numerical example needs care. Hanson says losing 0.5 percent of subscribers per send at twice-weekly frequency would halve a list in less than a year. With no additions and a loss of 0.5 percent of the remaining list each time, however, 104 sends leave roughly 59 percent. Halving takes about 139 sends, or 16 months. The precise result depends on the denominator; the replacement burden remains substantial.

The same denominator discipline matters when comparing churn with clicks. Hanson recommends overlaying the Disaffection Index against click-throughs and says a value above one signals erosion. For that comparison to be interpretable, teams need to state which measure is divided by which and use comparable reporting periods. His post does not supply a detailed calculation specification.

What people are saying

Hanson describes himself as “complicit” in the popularity of headline ROI figures. That admission matters because this is not a dismissal from outside the channel: it is a contributor to those benchmarks arguing that short-term calculations can miss costs that become visible over a longer customer relationship.

Validity’s position is that businesses should redirect some email budget toward higher-quality incoming addresses and the reporting needed to reduce churn. The post links that recommendation to stronger initial engagement from new subscribers. It also promotes Validity Engage, making this vendor advice rather than independent evidence that a particular measurement approach improves results.

Hanson also tackles a familiar management request: “send even more messages!” His response is qualified. Increasing frequency can initially raise total clicks even while the click-through rate falls. A falling rate alone therefore does not establish that the additional campaign failed; the total response still needs to be counted.

His illustrative frequency curve then reaches a point where additional sends produce fewer total clicks as subscribers tune out. The example starts with two to three campaigns per subscriber each week, described as roughly nine to 13 monthly. It illustrates a mechanism, not a tested frequency limit that applies to every sender.

The post also describes engagement scores combining opens, clicks, website visits, purchases and signs of disengagement. Those scores offer another view of program health, separate from raw list size. Teams examining that part of their reporting can also consult Email Vox’s discussion of email open-rate measurement.

What happens next

Hanson recommends an Engagement Inflection Point metric: identify when changes in sending volume or frequency move from helping to hurting overall performance. Click-throughs are one input, but he also names website traffic and revenue. That broader scope matters when a campaign produces activity without producing the business outcome its owners intended.

The proposed decision point is where the gap between additional clicks and churn is greatest. Hanson suggests using that evidence to push back on requests for still more campaigns. This turns a frequency discussion into a comparison of incremental response and subscriber loss, rather than a disagreement over whether the calendar feels too crowded.

A practical implementation would keep acquisition cost and lost future value beside the engagement results. That is an implication of Hanson’s framework, not a rollout process documented in the post. For a separate operational review, Email Vox’s sponsored deliverability checkup beyond open rates offers an adjacent starting point; it should not be confused with the financial assessment here.

Hanson says the next installment will examine tactics for improving performance and maximizing program value. This installment leaves senders with a measurement proposal rather than a universal target: establish what additional messages earn, what subscribers they cost and whether the trade-off still makes financial sense.