Are you up to date on the latest email marketing statistics? Smart marketers know that email marketing is an incredibly effective strategy. However, when your company considers which strategies fit into the budget, does email marketing have a place?
The truth is, email marketing should be on the top of your list, but if you aren’t hooked on the power of email marketing, we’ve created this list of up-to-date email marketing statistics.
Let’s jump in!
General Email Marketing Statistics
- Digital lead generation advertising spending is predicted to hit $3.24 billion in 2023.
- Email marketing holds a 2.54% share of the local advertising revenue.
- In 2021, there are over 4.1 billion active email users worldwide.
- It’s estimated that by 2024, the number of active email users will grow to 4.4 billion.
- 319.6 billion emails are sent and received every day!
- 91% of marketers say that email marketing is very important as a part of their marketing strategy.
- The primary objectives of email campaigns include sales (63%), engagement (50%), brand awareness (47%), and building loyalty (45%).
- The feeling of having little or no knowledge in email marketing among marketers has risen by 15% since 2015.
- The lifetime value of an email address has increased sharply by 33% year-on-year.
- Email marketers expect to grow their email budgets by 17% in the next year.
- 55% of users open and receive emails on mobile phones.
- 40% of companies in 2019 said they only have a “basic” strategy for optimizing email marketing for different devices.
- 42% of marketers see their biggest challenge being their limited email marketing budget.
- 41% of companies use notifications (cancellations and confirmations) as their leading email advertising formats.
- In 2019, 66% of businesses created a responsive email template to optimize emails across different devices.
- Web forms (or popups) are the best-performing lead capturing tools that help boost conversion rates.
Email Spam and Phishing Statistics
- The global spam percentage was at its highest at 92% in 2008.
- In 2019, the global spam percentage was considerably better by 28%.
- 39% of spam emails are from the health industry.
- In 2019, there were over 13,000 spam attempts by company CEOs around the world.
- In September 2020, spam messages accounted for 47.3% of all email traffic.
- Russia generated the most spam emails, with 23.5% of global spam volume.
- 97% of internet users can’t recognize sophisticated phishing emails.
- 30% of phishing emails don’t get opened, while 12% of users click on trap links.
- The number of phishing emails that contain harmful links has risen 97.25% since 2016.
- Only 3% of workers report spam emails to management.
- One in six emails get sent to the spam folder or end up in the subscriber’s list of blocked contacts.
- 54% of people have felt tricked by opening an email with a false or misleading subject line.
Email User Demographics and Behavior Statistics
- Ages 25-44 are the most active email users (93%), followed by ages 45-64 (90.1%).
- In the U.S., women and men are almost tied in email usage rates. Women make up 91% of email usage, while men make up 89%.
- 92% of Asian-Americans use email, compared to 91% of Caucasians and 88% of African-Americans.
- 43% of workers check their work email every few hours when they’re off work.
- Likewise, 52% of workers check their email every few hours while on duty.
- And while on vacation, 28% of workers check their work emails regularly.
- The leading reason for using email across generations is to communicate with others.
- 18.8% of people skim through emails.
- 12.5% of people glance at emails.
Email Subject Line and Body Statistics
- 47% of users open an email based on the subject line alone.
- 69% of people will mark an email as spam based on a subject line.
- The average email is 434 words long and takes approximately 3 minutes to read.
- On average, an email subject line contains 43 characters.
- It seems that shorter subject lines do better as 82% of email marketing experts send subject lines with less than 60 characters.
- Most email service providers cut the subject line off after around 40 characters.
- Only 10.9% of subject lines are 20 characters or less.
- Approximately 6% of email subject lines contain emojis.
- 60% of email subject lines use sentence-case capitalization, 34% use title-case capitalization, and only 6% use all lower-case.
Average Email Benchmarks Across Industries Statistics
- The average email open rate is 18%.
- The average click-through rate is 2.6%.
- The average click-to-open rate is 14.1%.
- The average unsubscribe rate is 0.1%.
- Non-profit organizations hold the highest email open rates across every industry (25.5%).
- The wellness and fitness industry maintains the highest unsubscribe rate of 0.40%.
- Government and politics have the highest click-through-rate (6%) and click-to-open rate (22.4%).
Email Personalization Statistics
- In 2019, 67% of businesses said they wanted to work on email personalization as they didn’t feel satisfied with their efforts.
- When only the subject line is personalized, the email gets a 7.4% open rate and a click rate of 0.4% on average.
- When the message is personalized, emails get an average open rate of 18.8% and click rate of 0.2%.
- Segmenting email lists and individualizing email campaign messaging works as the best personalization tactic for 51% of email marketers.
- Personalized emails have six-times higher transaction rates.
- While personalizing emails pay off, 70% of brands still aren’t sending them.
- 72% of email users say they’ll only engage with emails with personalized messaging.
- 36% of shoppers want more personalization in their messaging with a brand. However, they are hesitant to share personal information.
- 70% of millennials are frustrated with brands sending them emails that are irrelevant to them.
- Just over half of marketers (55%) think the emails they send are relevant to the receiver.
- The travel and hospitality industry holds the highest email personalization rates, with 63% of their email marketing tailored to specific clients.
- The next industry that offers the highest email personalization is retail, with an average of 38% of emails personalized.
- 79% of businesses in the retail industry are investing in personalization tools, including email.
Is Artificial Intelligence in Email Marketing’s Future?
Artificial intelligence has created a big movement in email marketing.
In fact, 41% of email marketers agree that the best effect artificial intelligence has on email marketing is revenue improvement by increasing open and click rates.
The most popular use of AI in email marketing is optimizing send times. 66% of company employees use this feature to ensure recipients are more likely to see the email content.
You can also use AI to restructure your email campaigns by breaking your market into hundreds of sub-campaigns, cleaning up email lists, personalizing email bodies, and writing personalized and successful email subject lines.
It’s safe to say that artificial intelligence plays a crucial role in any company’s email marketing strategy, and 37% of companies in 2019 said they needed to better their automated email marketing campaigns.
With that said, are you making use of AI in your email marketing? In 2020, automated emails boosted results, with 41% unique open rates and 24% click-to-open rates. That’s much higher than the industry average over the past few years.
2021 is a great year to start pushing the pedal on your email marketing efforts, whether that means incorporating AI, testing subject lines.
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We got our sources from Statista Prime and the following pages:
Campaign Monitor Security Boulevard Smarter HQ OptinMonster AWeber Instapage Litmus