The Top 100 Must-Know Email Marketing Statistics for 2022

Email communication began in the 1970s, and its growth has exploded year-over-year ever since. In fact, 99% of email users check their inbox every single day! 

And the rise of mobile devices has made email even more accessible and contributed to its accelerated growth in recent years.

It’s no wonder that email has become a favorite tool for marketers to grow their businesses.

In this post, we’ll look at the top 100 email marketing statistics you need to be aware of if you plan on using this powerful tool (or using it more effectively) in your business. We’ve pulled all of these statistics from trustworthy sources in the digital marketing industry, so you can count on them to be accurate.

Let’s start with some “big picture,” general email marketing stats, and then we’ll dive into some more specific data.

General Email Marketing Statistics for 2022

The following email marketing statistics show how popular email is worldwide and how effective it is as a marketing tool across virtually all industries.

Top 10 General Email Marketing Statistics:

1. Half of the world’s population has an email address—that’s 4.3 billion accounts globally! And that number is expected to grow to 4.6 billion by 2025.
2. The approximate number of emails sent in 2020 was 319.6 billion per day, and this number is expected to rise to 376.4 billion by 2025.
3. As stated in the introduction, not only does half the world have an email address, but 99% of email users check their email daily. Some people even check their email as often as 20 times a day!
4. Not only that, but 43% of survey respondents in the U.S. claim to check their work email outside of business hours, as well.
5. One reason people check their email so often is that it’s a “complementary activity,” meaning you can check your email while doing other things. 69% of people say they check their email while watching TV, 57% check it in bed, and 79% even check their email while on vacation!
6. Small business owners have ranked email marketing as the second most important medium for building brand awareness, after social media.
7. More importantly, marketers consider email marketing the most effective channel for marketing—better than paid search/ads, organic search, social media, and events.
8. Which is why, according to 73% of marketers, email is critical to a company’s success.
9. So, it’s hardly surprising that 82% of marketers worldwide use email marketing and that 89% of marketers use email as their primary channel for generating leads.
10. Over one-third (35%) of all marketers say that they send 3-5 emails per week to their customers.

B2B Email Marketing Statistics

If you own a B2B organization, email marketing will be one of your most powerful tools for turning leads into customers. Here are some of the top statistics to consider as you craft your email marketing plans.

Top 10 B2B Email Marketing Statistics:

1. 93% of B2B marketers use an email application to share content.
2. Of these B2B marketers, 87% claim email is their top free organic channel.
3. 31% of B2B marketers say that the best way to nurture leads is through email newsletters.
4. It’s no surprise, then, that 81 percent of B2B marketers use newsletters to market content to their lists.
5. The average B2B email open rate is 15.1%.
6. That open rate is 23% higher than for B2C emails.
7. B2B marketers claim that new product and feature announcement emails have the highest click-through rate.
8. In 2020, the average bounce rate for B2B emails was only 1.2%.
9. The most popular email service provider, Mailchimp, earned over $800 million in 2020, with Active Campaign coming in second at $165 million. Reportedly, however, Salesforce Marketing Cloud overtook Mailchimp in 2021. Regardless of which company is at the top of the list, clearly there’s a lot of money in email!
10. 17% of B2B companies only send one marketing email per month. At the other end of the spectrum, 16% email 6+ times per month. The other 67% fall between these two extremes.

B2C Email Marketing Statistics

Email marketing is also a powerful tool for B2C companies. The following statistics demonstrate email’s effectiveness for distributing content, customer acquisition, customer retention, and of course, making sales!

Top 10 B2C Email Marketing Statistics:

1. 72% of B2C marketers use email marketing software for content distribution.
2. 81% of retail professionals say that email marketing is great for customer acquisition and 80% say it is also effective for customer retention.
3. 59% of people say that email marketing affects their purchasing decisions. 
4. 50.7% buy something once a month via a marketing email, and 23.8% buy something through a marketing email several times per month!
5. 60% of consumers made a purchase thanks to a marketing email they received. In contrast, only 12.5% say that they would buy something directly on a social media channel.
6. Consumers spend 138% more when marketed to by email than if they do not receive email offers.
7. Roughly 33% of U.S. retail email list subscribers have purchased something from the company whose emails they receive.
8. 36% of consumers also claim that email is their primary way to learn about changes at a company. So, if you want people to know about your product launches or updates, email is the way to go!
9. 72% of customers prefer email to be the main channel of communication from a brand.
10. Sending a simple automated series of three emails to people who have abandoned their online shopping carts results in 69% more orders.

Mobile Email Marketing Statistics

As we’ve already shown, email marketing is a powerful tool for both B2B and B2C companies. And the effectiveness of that marketing can be further enhanced by accounting for the fact that many consumers spend a lot of time on their mobile devices, checking their email updates. 

Obviously, this activity is likely to result in purchasing decisions being made on the spot. Savvy marketers thus make every effort to ensure that their marketing materials are optimized for mobile consumption.

Here are some of the stats that prove how important it is for marketers to optimize their marketing for mobile devices.

Top 10 Mobile Email Marketing Statistics:

1. Over 90% of all internet users have a mobile device.
2. 60% of all emails are now opened on a mobile device first. Since 2011, mobile open rates have increased over 100%.
3. 64% of decision makers read their emails on mobile devices.
4. 21% of all emails are opened within the first hour after receiving them, which is a testament to the ease of access afforded by having one’s mobile device at hand at virtually all times.
5. Emails designed to be mobile-responsive increase clicks on mobile devices by 15%. Generally, people click more when on their computers as compared to their mobile devices. That said, when emails are optimized for mobile, this increases the click-through rate.
6. But all is not lost when someone opens an email on their mobile device and chooses not to click. In fact, 23% of consumers who open an email on their mobile device will open that same email later, many times on their desktop—and it has been shown that, if an email is first read on mobile and then read a second time on a desktop, there is a 65% higher chance that they will click on the second look.
7. When it comes to mobile devices, they aren’t all created equally (at least when it comes to opening emails). 81% of users prefer to open emails on their smartphones, as opposed to only 21% who prefer to open them on their tablets.
8. 60% of all smartphone users have contacted a business directly from search results delivered on their device.
9. 42.3% of consumers delete emails that are not optimized for mobile.
10. On the other hand, only 11% of email templates are optimized for mobile devices. This means that you have a real opportunity to beat the competition by ensuring your email marketing service offers mobile-responsive templates.

Email Automation Statistics

There are so many ways to use email to market to your customers, and many of these approaches can be automated with today’s email technology. In fact, there’s simply no way to stay on top of all these powerful marketing approaches without making automation part of your strategy.

Here are the top 10 statistics that demonstrate the power of email automation.

Top 10 Email Automation Statistics:

1. A reported 65% of all use automated email marketing.
2. 64% of B2B marketers use email automation.
3. 68.5% of marketers believe that automation improves the targeting of their messages.
4. Automation is used for sending a variety of email types, including welcome emails (47%), sales emails (46%), transactional emails (28%), invitations and reminders (27%), and blog updates (26%).
5. Automated emails have been shown to drive 320% more revenue compared to non-automated emails.
6. Automatically triggered transactional emails outperform broadcast and nurture emails and are three times more efficient.
7. Triggered emails have a 70.5% higher open rate and a 152% higher click-through rate than email newsletters.
8. The average unsubscribe rate for triggered emails is 0.58%.
9. The average spam rate for triggered emails is only 0.06%.
10. The three main benefits of email automation for businesses are saving time (30%), lead generation (22%), and an increase in revenue (17%).

Clearly, using automated emails should be a key part of your email marketing strategy.

Email Segmentation and Personalization Statistics

Savvy email marketers don’t just blast out the same marketing messages to everyone on their in-house lists. Instead, they use what they know about their opt-ins to segment them into sub-lists and personalize their marketing efforts. This approach leads to massively increased profits, as the following statistics show.

Top 10 Email Segmentation and Personalization Statistics:

1. According to one survey, the top three email marketing tactics are: list segmentation (51%), personalization (50%), and triggered emails (automation) (45%).
2. Emails with personalized subject lines are 26% more likely to be opened.
3. 74% of marketers say that customer engagement increases through email personalization.
4. Depending on what data you have on your prospects and customers, you can personalize your emails in a variety of ways. 66% of marketers who use personalization use age data to personalize their communications.
5. Marketing campaigns that segment their lists based on factors such as previous purchase activity or specific actions taken by the user get a 14.31% higher open rate as compared to non-segmented campaigns.
6. Marketers who segment their email lists also have click-through rates that are over 100% higher than non-segmented ones.
7. In addition, marketers who segment their lists increase email marketing revenue by 760%.
8. Through proper targeting, marketers can generate three times the revenue generated by non-targeted broadcast emails.
9. 77% of marketers say that they send personalized content emails to their subscribers.
10. In addition, about 50% of marketers believe that segmentation of their lists can improve response rates. 

Clearly, if you’re not yet using personalization and segmentation in your email campaigns, you’re leaving money on the table.

Email Marketing Open Rates Statistics

One of the main reasons businesses default to email marketing as their primary sales vehicle is that it is so effective at driving purchases. But people don’t purchase unless they (1) open the email and (2) click on the call to action. 

So, it certainly makes sense for all businesses who use email marketing to stay on top of these crucial metrics. Here are some key statistics to be aware of when it comes to email open rates. 

Top 10 Email Marketing Open Rates Statistics:

1. The average email marketing open rate worldwide in 2020 was 18%.
2. While the majority of survey respondents claim that they prefer image-based HTML emails, plain-text emails actually have higher performance.
3. 47% of email subscribers open an email because of the subject line. This shows how crucial subject lines are for your email marketing success—if the subject line doesn’t capture the reader’s attention, the email never gets read.
4. The average number of characters in an email subject line is 43.85.
5. Just adding the word “video” to a subject line increases open rates by 19%. It also decreases unsubscribes by 65%.
6. Adding an emoji to the email subject line increases open rates by as much as 56%. It’s therefore surprising that only 6.9% of subject lines analyzed use emojis. 
7. 63% of people say that they open an email to find discounts.
8. Sending your emails on Friday yields the highest open rates–19%. That said, running A/B split tests is always a good idea, as the best day and time of day to mail varies from audience to audience.
9. “Welcome” emails have the highest open rates of 91.43%, with an average click-through rate of 26.9%. The second highest email open rates are for “Back in Stock” alerts, notifying customers when a sold-out item has been restocked. These are opened by 65% of people who receive them.
10. The top three reasons people unsubscribe from an email list are: (1) too many emails (59%), (2) the information is no longer relevant (43%), and (3) they don’t recognize the brand or remember signing up (43%).

Email Marketing Click-Through Rates Statistics

Getting your emails opened is just half the battle. Then you need to get people to read them and take action—which is why you need to know these crucial statistics about click-through rates.

Top 10 Email Marketing Click-Through Rates Statistics:

1. The industry average click-through rate is 10.69%, but 22% of marketers report click-through rates of over 20%.
2. Adding the word “video” to a subject line increases the click-through rate by 65%.
3. Moreover, attaching a video within an email increases click-through rates by 200-300%.
4. Sending emails on Friday yields the highest click-through rates (2.7%).
5. Conversely, the worst open and click-through rates are on weekends.
6. Welcome emails have the highest click-through rates: 26.9%.
7. Emails that end with “Thanks in advance” or a similar variation receive higher response rates than other signoffs.
8. Abandoned cart emails have 45% open rates and 21% of those opened emails are clicked. Furthermore, half of the people who click go on to complete their purchase.
9. Click-through rates depend, to some extent, on the size of the mailing list. Data shows that the highest click-through rates are found with lists between 1,000 and 2,500 subscribers—5.32%. For lists between 2,500 and 5,000 subscribers, the CTR is 3.98%. Lists larger than 5,000 subscribers have lower click-through rates, probably because large lists may contain more invalid or inactive addresses.
10. Surprisingly, only 70% of marketers monitor their click-through rates. It’s hard to understand why this percentage isn’t higher, as you can’t make a sale unless the reader clicks through to your sales page.

Email Marketing ROI Statistics

So, just how profitable is email marketing? You can find out by focusing on one key metric: return on investment (ROI). 

Knowing your ROI for any individual campaign and for the cumulative effects of all your campaigns allows you to calculate how successful your email marketing efforts are.

Let’s run through the top email marketing ROI statistics you should be aware of.

Top 10 Email Marketing ROI Statistics:

1. According to one study, email marketing accounts for 19.8% of ALL transactions, trailing only organic traffic (21.8%) and paid search (19.9%).
2. Additionally, email is 40X more effective at acquiring customers than Facebook and Twitter—combined.
3. On average, email marketing generates $36 for every $1 spent. That’s a 3,600% return on investment!
4. Not only that, but 18% of companies achieve an email marketing ROI of greater than $70 for every $1 spent!
5. Email marketing provides the largest ROI of any activity for about 59% of marketers.
6. Because of the relative returns on both time and money, 4 out of 5 marketers state that they would sooner give up social media than email.
7. Also, 49.5% of marketers planned on raising their email marketing budgets in the future. This is because they’re seeing more and more engagement with their emails, and as a result, higher ROI.
8. Larger companies (over 500 employees) have higher ROIs than smaller companies. Companies with over 500 employees see a 41:1 ROI on their email marketing, while companies with 100-499 employees achieve an ROI of 40:1, probably because they’re often under-resourced. Still, 40:1 is excellent!
9. Sending too few or too many emails can both impact sales. When it comes to volume, sending 9-16 emails per month has been shown to yield the highest ROI. Mailing in this “sweet spot” returned an astounding ROI of 46:1.
10. Amazingly, only 30% of brands claim that they currently measure their email marketing ROIs adequately. This is a big opportunity for improvement!

Bottom line, when you compare the ROI for email marketing to other common digital strategies, you’ll find that email marketing’s ROI can’t be beaten. This is due to email’s easy automation, low barrier to entry, and overall minimal costs.

And that’s why email marketing is king!

Putting These Email Marketing Statistics to Work

There you have it—the top 100 email marketing stats for 2022.

So, now what? Now the fun starts!

Set aside an hour or two of your time to look carefully at these stats in the context of your business.

Not using segmentation in your email campaigns? That’s an opportunity. Not using personalization? Another opportunity. Not mailing your list often enough—or mailing them too often? Another opportunity.

Let these statistics be your guide to upping your email marketing game. Soon you’ll be reaping the rewards of this powerful marketing tool.