30+ Essential Email Marketing Statistics

Email isn't the most flashy sales channel, but it works.

Every seasoned marketer and salesperson knows that it's hard for any channel to deliver better results than email.

From cold outreach campaigns to weekly newsletters to your best customers, email is an effective channel from the top-of-the-funnel to the bottom.

In this post, we're going to take a look at email marketing statistics to help you understand email marketing, and improve your campaigns.

We'll look at data covering:

• Overview: Why Should You Be Using Email Marketing?
• Email Marketing Open and Click-Through Rates
• How Personalization Pays Dividends
• How Email Marketing Delivers ROI
• Email is a Great Way to Engage with Users on Mobile

Let’s jump straight in and look at some of our favourite email marketing statistics, updated for 2020.

Overview: Why Should You Be Using Email Marketing?

If you’re wondering if email is still worth your while, here are some statistics to show you that it most likely is.

• In 2020, there's going to be over 306 billion emails sent and received each day. By 2022, that number will be at 347.3 billion (Statista)

• 86% of professionals give priority to email connection (HubSpot).
• 47% of marketers rate email marketing as the most effective marketing channel (GetResponse)
• 80% of professionals say email is their most-used channel for internal communication (Adobe)
• 72% of customers prefer email as their main channel for business communication (Marketing Sherpa)

• 73% of marketers rate email as an 'excellent' channel, compared to 72% for SEO, and 67% for SEM (eConsultancy)
• An email address is worth, on average, £84.50

Email Marketing Open and Click-Through Rates

Not every email you send is going to get opened.

Luckily, because email is still a far more direct way to engage with your audience than social media or ads are, you'll still get lots of eyeballs on your email content.

Let's take a look at the open and click-through rates you can expect to see:

• In 2020, the average open rate across all industries is 17.8% (Campaign Monitor)
• The average click-through rate for emails is 3.43% (Get Response)
• The average unsubscribe rate in 2019 was 0.2% (Get Response)

• The day with the highest average open rate is Tuesday, with 21.16% of emails being opened(GetResponse)

• The first ten days of the month have the best overall performance in terms of open, click, and order rates for ecommerce stores (Omnisend).

Remember, these statistics are just benchmarks.

If you have an engaged subscriber list who want to hear from you, your open rates and click-through rates can be far higher than these averages.

Personalization Pays Dividends

Most marketers and sales reps don't personalize their emails as much as they should be.

If you're guilty of that, this next section might convince you that it's time to improve your personalization efforts.

• Personalized emails lead to 6x more transactions than generic marketing emails. (Business2Community)
• Segmented email campaigns see 14.31% higher open rates than non-segmented email campaigns (Mailchimp)
• Segmenting email marketing campaigns to increase relevance can have a 760% increase in revenue. (HubSpot)
• Personalized subject lines improve open rates by 26% (Campaign Monitor)
• Studies have found when companies start personalizing their email campaigns, CTRs increase by an average of 14% (Demand Gen Report)
• Personalized, trigger campaigns result in more than 2x the transaction rates of non-personalized trigger emails (Experian)

• Nearly all marketers agree that personalization increases open rate, CTRs, customer satisfaction, sales, returning site traffic, and decreases their unsubscribe rate (IDM)

As you can see, personalization is an easy way to massively increase how well your emails perform.

You’ll see more opens, more clicks, and importantly, more revenue from emails that are personalized to the recipient.

How Email Marketing Delivers ROI

At the end of the day, nothing matters except the ROI of your marketing channels.

Followers, Likes, and Re-Tweets don't pay the bills.

Luckily, email has one of the highest ROI of any marketing channel. That's one of the reasons why it's still used by every successful brand out there.

• You are 6x more likely to get a click from an email than from a tweet (Campaign Monitor)
• 59% of B2B marketers prefer email for lead generation.
• 49% of marketers say they spend more time and resources on email than on other channels (BtoB Magazine)
• When it comes to content distribution, 40% of B2B marketers say email is their most important channel (Content Marketing Institute)
• Using double opt-in to increase email ROI by 13% (Litmus)
• 50.7% of people say they make a purchase because of an email at least once a month (HubSpot)

As you can see, email marketing is still a major driver of revenue.

For many companies, it's the marketing channel with the highest ROI and has a large influence on the final purchase decision.

Email is a Great Way to Engage with Users on Mobile

If you want to engage with your audience on mobile, email is a great option.

Most people check their emails on their phones relatively soon after waking up or on their morning commute, and it's rare to wait until you're at work to see if anything interesting has landed in your inbox.

Let's take a look at just how effective it is:

• 42% of email is opened on a mobile device (Litmus)

• 75% of Americans will delete an email if it's not optimized for mobile (Brafton)
• One out of every three email clicks comes from a mobile device (Campaign Monitor)
• 75% of Gmail users use their mobile device to access their accounts (TechCrunch)

If you want to engage with your audience on mobile, email is still one of the most effective ways to do it.

Whether your audience is made up of CEOs at Fortune 500 companies, or are stay-at-home parents, you can guarantee they have one thing in common; they're checking their email on mobile throughout the day.

Remember: Your Audience Isn't 'Average'

It's important to keep in mind that the email statistics we've rounded up are all averages.

They may work for the 'average' brand, but that's not you.

You should take the time to understand your email subscribers, learn what type of content they want to read, and what devices they're opening it on.

Most good email service providers will show you detailed analytics on this, so all you have to do is implement those ideas into your email marketing strategy and track the results.