50 Email Marketing Statistics for 2020 and Beyond

Emails are an effective channel for building meaningful connections with your customers and converting prospects into customers. Over time, there have been many myths trumpeted by naive marketers, including the famous ‘email marketing is dead’. However, that particular myth, as do others, does not stand up to the scrutiny of real-world statistics. And as they say, numbers don’t lie. 

In this piece, you will find current statistics from reliable sources that can help you determine how to improve your email marketing strategy going forward. 

1. 46% of brands are increasing their overall email marketing budget. Litmus
2. Email client market share as of August 2020. Email Client Market Share.
3. In contacting customers, organizations use e-mail 75% of the time, followed by social media at 37%. DMA Marketer Email Tracker 2020.
4. Inadequate budget/resource is the most significant challenge to successfully executing email marketing programs, followed by data (42%) and leadership/strategy (40%). DMA.
5. The top five metrics brands use to evaluate the effectiveness of their email marketing are sales (48%), click-throughs (40%), conversions (39%), brand awareness (38%), and engagement (37%). DMA.
6. The top three types of email content that help brands to achieve campaign objectives are discounts & offers (49%), advice, info or tutorials (45%), and advanced notice of products & sales (33%). DMA.
7. 85% of consumers consider less than half the emails they receive from brands useful to them. DMA.
8. The top four reasons consumers give their emails to brands are discounts & offers (48%), ‘they are regular customers’ (43%), joining loyalty programs (40%), and email receipts (40%). DMA.
9. 59% of brands spend no more than 20% of their marketing budgets on emails. DMA.
10. 53% of respondents feel frustrated by receiving too many irrelevant ads and emails from B2B companies. Drift.
11. 57% of marketers are somewhat successful in their email marketing strategy while 31% consider theirs very successful. Ascend2.
12. Marketers consider better content (66%) and more personalization (65%) the best tactics for improving the effectiveness of email programs. Ascend2.
13. There are 4.037 billion email users globally. Statista.
14. 50% of email subscribers open a message based on the subject line. GetResponse.
15. Emails with images perform better than those without. Click-Through Rate is at 4.11% vs 2.87%. GetResponse.
16. The average open rate for emails globally is 22.15%. GetResponse.
17. The average click-through rate for emails globally is 3.43%. GetResponse.
18. Sending one newsletter per week (as practiced by 49.70% of marketers) delivers the best engagement results with a 33.40% open rate and a 4.65% click-through rate. GetResponse.
19. The average open rate for welcome emails is a whopping 82.21%. GetResponse.
20. 20.41% of emails are opened within the first hour of delivery. The open rate subsequently recedes with time. GetResponse.
21. After analytics tools, email marketing tools (85%) top the list of technologies B2B organizations use for content marketing. Content Marketing Institute.
22. After social media content and blog posts/short articles, email newsletters (81%) are the top content type of B2B marketers. Content Marketing Institute.
23. Email newsletters (31%) are the best content type for nurturing leads. Content Marketing Institute.
24. Email engagement (90%) is the top metric that B2B marketers use to measure content performance. Content Marketing Institute.
25. 65% of businesses have integrated email and CRM tools. Dotdigital.
26. Email (71%) is the most effective channel for customer retention and loyalty. Dotdigital. 
27. Email (53%) is the second most effective channel for converting prospects and leads into customers, only trailing websites (55%). Dotdigital.
28. The three most important capabilities for an email marketing platform are analytics and reporting (75%), email deliverability (72%), and personalization (62%). Dotdigital.
29. Triggered campaigns can generate over 75% of email revenue. Dotdigital.
30. Subscribers spend an average of 12 seconds looking at an email. Dotdigital.
31. The global email inbox placement rate is 83%. Validity.
32. The global email spam placement rate is 7%, with a 10% missing rate. Validity.
33. The three most effective email personalization tactics are email list segmentation (51%), individualized email messaging (50%), and behavior-triggered emails (45%). Ascend2.
34. 61.9% of emails are opened on mobile devices. SuperOffice.
35. Video in an email boosts click-through rates by 65% and reduces unsubscribes by 26%. Campaign Monitor. 
36. Message Personalization is the #1 tactic used by email marketers to improve performance. Hubspot.
37. The top tactics improving email engagement are audience segmentation, email copy, personalization, and email design, with all over 20%. Hubspot.
38. 23% of brands have experimented with interactive elements in email and 32% are planning to try it out soon. Litmus.
39. The ROI of email marketing is $42 per dollar spent, up from an average ROI ratio of 38:1 in 2018. Litmus. 
40. 61% of companies claim to adequately measure ROI from their email efforts. Litmus.
41. Email marketing programs with two or fewer full-time employees generate an ROI of 42:1 on average, compared to 46:1 for programs with three to five full-time employees. Litmus.
42. ROI is highest (48:1) when brands send 5 to 8 emails to each subscriber per month. Litmus.
43. Top tactics that increase email ROI include A/B testing all emails (37%), live content (28%), using an extensive pre-send checklist (26%), dynamic content (22%), and animated GIFs (21%). Litmus.
44. 347.3 billion emails would be sent per day by 2023. Statista.
45. Only ¼ of email offers from brands are interesting enough to open, mainly due to issues of frequency and quality. Adobe.
46. On average, email contributes over 20% of revenue for businesses. Dynamic Yield.
47. 71% of consumers believe personalized experiences would influence their decision to interact with emails. Dynamic Yield.
48. 45% of survey respondents claimed the time after work is when they had the largest propensity to actually click through an email to purchase. Dynamic Yield.
49. When met with an email they liked, 45% claimed they would open an email and act on it at that moment, 35% would simply hope to remember it later, and 34% would mark it as unread and access it later. Dynamic Yield.

Tuesdays have the highest email open rates, and simultaneously the highest unsubscribe rates. Campaign Monitor.