20 Email Marketing Statistics That Small Businesses Should Know
Kelly is a former Google Tech Entrepreneur and Apple Developer who has counseled businesses of all sizes and growth stages. You can find her expertise across Fit Small Business in marketing, business website, and business trend content.
This article is part of a larger series on Email Marketing.
Email marketing is a powerful method to grow your small business. It can help you generate quality leads, increase brand awareness, and boost your bottom line. If you’re looking to kick-start your email marketing campaign or perhaps reconsider the one that you’re currently running, we compiled a list of stats that can help you out.
Check out these 20 email marketing statistics that you should know:
1. Four billion people use email worldwide
In 2020, there were 4 billion email users worldwide. That is over half the world’s population of 7.9 billion people. The number of email users is likely to increase to 4.6 billion by 2025. And keep in mind that this number is worldwide, including areas without dense or widespread technology access. If you are a marketer in a developed or technology-dense country, a lot more than half of your audience has an email address.
2. Nearly 90% of Americans use email
89.45% of Americans over the age of 15 use email. There is some variation of email usage within age groups, but not a huge amount. Users aged 15 to 24 are 90% likely to have an email address. If your target audience is aged 25 to 44, you are almost guaranteed to be able to contact them over email, since their email usage rate is 93.6%. At age 45 to 64, usage drops back down to 90% (which is still by far the majority of users), and at over 65 the email use rate is 84.1%.
3. Email gets you nearly 5X more buyers than social media
Sixty percent of customers who purchase products say that they bought because of a marketing email. In contrast, only 12.5% of customers say that they considered clicking the “buy” button on a social media promotion. Social media is still important for marketing—don’t get us wrong—but email gets you a lot of bang for your buck.
4. Email marketing has a $42 ROI
Out of all marketing channels, email delivers the biggest bang for the buck. A dollar spent in email marketing generates a $42 return on investment (ROI) in 2021, according to recent email marketing statistics by Constant Contact.
5. 306 billion emails are sent every day
306 billion emails were sent per day in 2020, on average. In 2025, there will probably be 376 billion emails sent per day. Sure, many of these emails are unwanted or spam mail and are going straight to people’s junk folders, but email marketing statistics show that many more emails are wanted and welcomed communications that people voluntarily signed up for.
6. Friday is the best day for click-throughs
To make sales from your email campaigns, you need customers to open your emails and click through to your site. Overall, the industry rate for click-throughs from emails is 2.13%. However, if you send your emails on Fridays, that email marketing statistics rate goes up to 2.7%. Whether this is because customers are more likely to be procrastinating at work on Fridays or because they’re starting their weekend retail therapy early remains to be seen.
7. Tuesdays are the best days for email opens
Tuesdays have the highest open rates of the whole week. And you can’t make sales from your email campaigns if customers aren’t opening your messages. On the other hand, according to email marketing statistics, Tuesdays also have the highest rates of unsubscribing from emails.
If customers are most likely to be annoyed on Tuesday mornings, you might not necessarily want your email to be at the top of their inbox. That being said, the unsubscribe rate on Tuesdays is still a lot lower (0.2%) than the open rate (18.3%), so don’t worry about it too much.
8. There are three peaks of open times
Most people open emails in the morning, when they are getting ready to work, or in the middle of getting things done, specifically at 10 a.m. At 2 p.m., many office workers will start opening emails again as the afternoon lull hits and they look forward to finishing the workday. This is a great time to send emails if you are targeting office workers as your audience.
Then again in the evening, between 7 and 10 p.m., people will often open promotional emails on their own time as they relax and wind down, do some online shopping, and chill on their phones before bed.
9. Welcome emails are 82% likely to be opened
The overall open rate for emails is only 21%. However, if customers signed up for the emails, that email marketing statistic skyrockets to 82%. If you can get customers to sign up for your mailing list, they are highly likely to open your emails. In addition, if your subject line includes the customer’s name, they are 50% more likely to open it than if it doesn’t.
10. About 42% of people open emails on their phones
41.9% of emails are opened on mobile devices, making it crucial that you make sure your emails are formatted to be readable on phone and tablet screens. 39.9% of users open emails on web apps, while only 18.2% of users open emails on desktops. This email marketing stat makes it clear that companies need to prioritize readability on phones.
11. The device matters for your subject line
Only the first 30 characters of your subject line are visible on the iPhone email app. So make those first 30 characters count. You don’t have to get the whole message across in that short a space, but you need to catch their attention so they’ll click on it.
12. Segmentation makes people more likely to click through
Segmenting your email list can massively increase your open and click-through rates. One email marketing statistics study found that a segmented email campaign can get open rates as high as 94% and click-through rates of 38%, compared with a typical unsegmented email campaign with a 42% open rate and a 4.5% click-through rate.
The increase in open rate is the most commonly cited reason that marketers use segmented email campaigns, with 82% of marketers touting that benefit.
13. Trigger emails work 3X better than email segmentation & blast
Segmented emails, which are different lists based on different customer attributes, work much better than blast emails. However, according to research, trigger emails, like abandoned carts, are three times better and by far the most effective at getting opens and click-throughs.
14. The ideal email length is 50 to 125 words
Emails with 25 words have response rates of less than 45%, while 25 to 50 words yield over 50% response rates. Fifty to 125 words yield 51% responsiveness, and then rates decline again over 125 words, according to email marketing stats.
15. The ideal subject line is 6 to 10 words
Keep your subject lines short and sweet. Most mobile devices don’t display many characters, and you want to catch your customers’ attention. Email marketing statistics show that subject lines between six and 10 words long have over a 20% open rate, less than five words have a 16% open rate, and over 10 words will get you an even lower open rate than that. Customer names, song lyrics, and movie titles are good ways to get your customers to click when you don’t have much space.
16. The best emails are simple (3rd-grade level)
Emails that have a third-grade reading level have the best response rate—at 53%. This is followed by emails written at a kindergarten reading level, which have a 46% response rate. Email marketing statistics show that high school-level emails get a 45% response, while college-level emails only get a 39% response rate.
17. 64% of small businesses use email marketing
According to Campaign Monitor’s email marketing statistics, email marketing is the second-most popular marketing strategy for small businesses, with 64.1% of small businesses reporting that they use email promotions. Only social media beats email in popularity, with 69.6% of small businesses saying that they promote on social media.
18. Abandoned cart emails are most effective within 20 minutes
Customers abandon their online carts all the time. 77% of customers who put items in their shopping cart on a website will then click away from the website without checking out. That is a huge loss of sales, and it can mess up your sales by making your inventory register lower than it actually is, preventing other customers from buying those items.
Fortunately, following up by email is highly effective at getting customers to come back and check out their carts. Sending an abandoned cart email within 20 minutes has a 5.2% conversion rate, and that email marketing stat goes down the longer you take to send out your triggered email.
19. Media & entertainment have the best stats overall
When you divide the email marketing statistics up by industry, media and entertainment have the second-best opening rates (22.49%), highest click-through rates (4.98%), and lowest unsubscribe rates (0.18%). These numbers are a compilation of data from Mailchimp, HubSpot, Campaign Monitor, and GetResponse, via Kinsta.
20. Emojis in your subject lines are good
Gone are the days when emojis were considered unprofessional. Nowadays, including emojis in your subject line can increase your open rates by as much as 56%. Emojis can grab readers’ attention, set the tone of the email, and convey a sense of fun.
Bottom Line
Email marketing is a profitable investment that can help you grow your business. Consider these email marketing stats as you launch your email marketing campaign or if you are looking to make a few tweaks to the one that you’re currently running.
