As if holiday email campaign planning wasn’t tough enough, Q4 is also email marketing budget season. No pressure there!
Today, economic changes inside and beyond your company can bring more challenges. You probably need to rethink your marketing budget planning process so you can claim – and hang on to – your fair share of the pie.
In this guide, I’ll share my best advice to help you build a better budget for your 2026 email marketing program. It’s not the usual tips recycled for a challenging year. I’ve spent years creating and defending realistic email budgets that capitalize on email’s value to the company.
My advice will help you develop a realistic email marketing budget that reflects your email marketing strategy, funds your email goals, and provides a pathway to growth in 2026. This will take more than just duplicating your 2025 spreadsheet and adding 10%, but the result will be a budget you and your numbers people can work with.
What can we expect for email marketing budget planning in 2026?
Let’s start with a dose of reality.
Although total marketing budgets have recovered from their COVID-era crash (down to 6.4% of total revenue), they have flatlined at 7.7%, according to a 2025 Gartner survey, and not much is expected to change.
Now, I’m not a predictions guy. Too much can change between now and next year, and companies are so diverse in their needs and approaches to marketing budgeting planning that blanket statements about whether marketing budgets will shrink or grow have little value by themselves.
However, budgets are predictive instruments. So, we should know the environment our budgets will operate in. I have two thoughts here:
Predictions are mixed for 2026. Some marketing fortune tellers say companies will hold the line on spending while also shifting priorities to emphasize tech and data services. In other words, don’t expect a big increase in headcount unless it’s for a specialist in one of those areas.
You know best how your company is faring in its niche of your market. That can help you keep your dreams realistic, but you can still dream! As the saying goes, “If you don’t ask, you don’t get.”
Martech investment is stalling. We haven’t seen companies investing in marketing technology for the last two years. But don’t let that stop you from proposing a significant martech initiative, such as moving to a new ESP.
How you frame your request will affect your chances of success. Emphasize strategic gains over tactical innovation. Scroll down to No. 3 below to get my advice for making this happen.
2 steps to prep for email marketing budget creation
First: Rewrite the playbook
For many marketers, budget planning is a stressful period, especially if you just got handed what looks like a wild revenue goal for the coming year and a warning to pare your request down to the essentials. Again – no pressure there!
Yes, you’re in the thick of holiday campaign planning, managing and executing on your day-to-day campaigns, and doing everything else that goes into your long workday.
But now is also a time to dream about growing and optimizing your email resources and finding ways to make those dreams come true.
Second: Strategy before tactics
Most of us don’t work for a company that pours buckets of money into marketing every year. (And if you do, let me know!) We have to work hard to justify every penny spent on marketing.
You can do that when you lead with strategy – when you know why you are doing something – instead of tactics, which cover how you do it.
Having a strategic mindset means that you will be prepared for the moment your CFO quizzes you about your request to upgrade to a new ESP. You could say, “It will allow us to use our data more efficiently so we can send more targeted and relevant messages to our customers, thus increasing conversions and engagement. I predict it will bring in X% more revenue and reduce our acquisition costs by X%.”
This is a tactical approach: “I heard about this program at a conference, and it would be really cool. It would increase our open rate by X% and make us an innovator over our competition.”
Tip: CFOs don’t care about open rates or your cool factor. They just want to know if it will make or save money. Even talking about ROI might not help if they don’t want to invest in the first place.
Switching ESPs or adding marketing automation or data management platforms are capital expenses. You can expect your executives to scrutinize your request even more closely. Be ready with numbers that show solid improvement in real revenue, reduced costs, and greater efficiency.
Think of your email marketing budget as a strategic device, not just a bunch of numbers you invented to fill fields on a spreadsheet. Tie every number to your strategic plan.
Note: If you don’t have a strategic plan, take a few minutes before you do anything else today and come up with one! You need that to run an effective and impact-making email program anyway. It has another benefit, which I’ll explain shortly.
Even if you already handed in your budget proposal, take a few minutes now to read my tips for creating an email marketing budget that will help you reach your goals, allow you to stretch a little, and even safeguard it if you run into economic turbulence in the next 12 to 14 months.
1. Front-load your big budget requests
Back in January 2025, I advised email marketers to move spending on major projects into the first six months of the year. This includes money earmarked for new programs or technology, acquisition, conferences, or educational events.
This tactical move departs from traditional budgeting practice, but it can help you mitigate the effect of unexpected budget cuts in the last six months of the year. That’s when companies begin to get nervous about revenue.
We don’t know how the events of this year will affect marketing in general next year. Stay on top of developments within your company as well as market forces that could help or hinder your company’s efforts in 2026.
For example, I’m seeing more reports that say higher prices due to tariffs on retail goods are driving more customers to secondary markets like resale instead of new products. That might not affect your company in the slightest, but if tariffs are on your marketing radar, it could be a potential budget-limiting factor to consider in your spending timeline.
2. Focus on showing value
Many companies still see marketing as a cost center in the revenue ecosystem instead of a profit center, like sales. Some of that attitude comes from managers who have never spent time laboring in the marketing trenches. But it’s also somewhat on us, too, for not drawing a clear line between marketing expenses and bottom-line results.
That direct line is attribution, and it’s a perennial problem, especially when your company uses last-touch attribution in a sale. Your email campaign drove customers to act, but the sale happened on the website, so email gets shut out.
Changing your attribution model this late in the year isn’t realistic. But you can include reports that show how email contributed to company goals, whether they’re sales-related or tied to something else.
In other words, don’t just focus on your numbers. Show the “why” as well. How did your team excel? How will your proposed new spending help you not just meet your revenue goal but also blow right past it? That’s what gets your CFO’s hard little heart beating faster, and it will be the key to getting a larger piece of the budget pie.
3. Propose one innovative new program
What is something you have longed to do, maybe even done the prep work for, but haven’t launched yet? Maybe you want to create or expand your onboarding series. Acquire better leads. Refresh your abandoned-cart program. Switch to a new marketing automation vendor so you can operate more efficiently and effectively.
For 2026, propose one thing that will help you drive growth toward your business goals. Predict what the ROI will be. Show how it will make money or cut costs. Those are the two things that will snag your executive team’s attention, so be sure to connect the dots so clearly that even the most anti-marketing exec can’t miss it.
PS: Framing your request as a strategy-backed initiative is more persuasive. That’s where the time you spent on developing your email marketing strategy pays off.
4. Have a backup plan
Every good budgeter thinks in two tracks: The budget you submit and the one you’ll fall back on if you get a direct order to cut 20% thanks to revenue shortfalls or other disasters.
As you plan for 2026, know what you absolutely cannot trim, such as locked-in contracts for services and platforms. Calculate separately what you could afford to lose easily and what would hamper your operations to the point where it would cut into revenue.
Yes, you’re planning for the worst-case scenario at the same time you’re dreaming of expansion. But this will keep you from panicking and making unstrategic decisions if the ax falls.
Wrapping up
I omitted a few classic budget-prepping tips in this list, such as looking at where you overspent or pulled back in 2025. That’s just standard operating procedure in the budget creation process.
I will reiterate one key piece of budget advice that many overlook: If you expect to have budget left over, spend it! But think strategically about that surplus. What could you spend it on to produce results that would boost your program this year and next? Here are three suggestions:
- Add or expand your testing program to help you refine your email marketing strategy or fine-tune your email programs.
- Bring in an impartial third party to audit and review your operations and potentially reveal even more time- and money-saving opportunities.
- Choose one automated email program, such as onboarding, abandoned-cart reminders, or win-back, to review and improve.
One final tip as you build a better 2026 budget: Work with your team. Budgeting is not an isolated process. Getting buy-in from your team members and your leads will help you create a stronger proposal up front and better execution as the year rolls on.
Now it’s time to sharpen those pencils, prep your fresh new spreadsheet, and get to work! And if you need expert guidance, remember that our email specialists are just an email or phone call away. Check in with us to see how we can help you get the email marketing budget you and your email team deserve!
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