25 Stats that Prove Why Brands Should Use Email

Marketers have more tools to reach customers than ever. New platforms and channels allow for a greater variety of ways to interact with people. Even with all of these new channels, platforms, technology, and data, one channel continues to perform for marketers.

Email.

Why? Because it works.

Don’t just take our word for it.

We compiled the 25 statistics that prove why brands should use email from a variety of industry experts and studies. Unlike many other online resources, we’ve taken care to highlight recent studies (within the past 12 months) to ensure you have confidence in the current state of email marketing. This post also highlights why email marketing is your best bet for successful marketing campaigns.

After reading this, if you’re still not convinced, give us a call; we’d be happy to discuss your specific situation and questions.

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By 2020, over 305 billion emails will be sent and received daily. Moreover, that number is expected to reach almost 350 billion by 2023. (Source)

While open rates vary significantly by industry, the average open rate for all industries is 17.92%. (Source)

Email open rates and click-through rates have increased steadily since 2014, signaling that privacy regulations are pushing brands to have an increased focus on list hygiene and higher-quality subscribers, in turn improving campaign targeting and increasing success rates. (Source)

People prefer to receive email communications from brands when compared to other channels; this is the case across multiple industry sectors, including Retail, Travel & Hospitality, Entertainment, Nonprofit, and Digital Media. (Source)

People check their email constantly. In fact, 52% of people report checking their personal emails every few hours while at work. (Source)

People are 4x more likely to check their email first thing in the morning than social media or any other activity online. (Source)

More than half of subscribers (58%) are reading emails from their phone. (Source)

For every $1 a company spends on email marketing, they can expect to earn $38 of revenue on average. While a survey from eMarketer reveals that email marketing drives 25% of the overall revenues from those companies surveyed. (Source)

Forty-seven percent of email recipients open an email based on the subject line alone. At the same time, 69% of email recipients report email as spam based solely on the subject line. (Source)

It’s estimated that the U.S. will spend over 350 million dollars on email advertising in 2019. (Source)

When asked about the strategic importance of a number of marketing channels, email was the most important channel mentioned by 91% of marketers. (Source)

The primary objectives of email campaigns are sales (62%), engagement (50%), brand awareness (47%) and building loyalty (45%). Customer service was named by just a quarter. (Source)

Eighty-five percent of Gen Z respondents said they use email at least monthly, and primarily for exchanging personal emails and receiving emails from companies. With over 80% checking email at least once per day. (Source 1, Source 2)

Email results change over time. There’s a big spike in the first few hours, followed by a gradual drop. Almost 19% of all email campaigns are opened in the very first hour after sending. With each hour, your chances of getting more opens decrease. After 6 hours, over half of your emails have already been opened. (Source)

The average open rates for emails that contained emoji in the subject line were 25.02%. That’s almost 3 percentage points higher than the average. Yet fewer marketers use them these days (3.9%) compared to previous years (6.7%.) (Source)

Only around 11% of marketers use a pre-header, but emails with a preheader get much higher average open rates – 27.82% vs 21.46%. (Source)

The best time for email opens is actually late afternoon. The pattern of opens increases as people begin to wake up and start their day, then subsides again dwindle as they go to sleep. (Source)

Transactional emails triggered by a customer’s behavior, like order confirmations and shipping notices, have average (mean) open rates of nearly 44% — 20 percentage points higher than non-transactional emails. (Source)

Improving your unsubscribe rate just 0.1% would save 1,000 subscribers every time you send to a database of 1 million people. That’s more than 200,000 contacts retained over a year if you send four emails per week. (Source)

Email was the most popular method for internet users worldwide to stay in touch with retailers, more so than via apps or social media. (Source)

More email is read on Mobile than on desktop email clients. 42% of email is now opened on a mobile device. (Source)

The average time spent reading an email increased by nearly 29% over the last 7 years, but it’s still less time spent than you’d think. (Source)

Brands that can measure their email marketing ROI very well report returns of 46:1, compared to only 33:1 for brands that can measure their ROI adequately. (Source)

Fifty-nine percent of people said that marketing emails influence their purchase decisions, while just over 50% buy from marketing emails at least once a month. (Source)

Email campaigns and educational content are reliable ways to nurture relationships. Email and educational content are top 2 ways B2B content marketers nurture their audience.

You control 100% of the content in emails to your audience. As a brand sending emails, you have full control over the content recipients see. In social media, there’s no way to control what posts will be shown to which users as it is the automatic algorithms that decide it. email can spur sales, generate new customers, and help create stronger retention. While social networks first need to engage people so that they can become customers.