Email marketing statistics and trends in 2021

You probably already know that email marketing is effective. But how do your efforts benchmark towards the global figures? And how do your email marketing efforts perform compared to other businesses in the same industry?

Overall global email statistics

What's the current state of email as a form of communication?

• There is an estimate of 4.1 billion active email accounts globally in 2021.
• 99% of all email users check their inbox each day.
• 126,7 trillion emails are expected to be sent out during 2022.
  
  

Overall open and click rates

Open rate and click rate are two crucial KPIs in email marketing.

• 21.33% is the average open rate across all industries, including both B2C and B2B.
• The average B2B open rate is 15.1%.
• 2.62% is the average click rate across all industries, including both B2C and B2B.

Email opening rate per year

Open rates and click rates per industry

• Government-related email has the highest open rates of 28.77%
• With an open rate of 27,74%, emails sent to hobby entities come in second place.
• Average click-through rates across industries are 7.8%.
• Looking at click-through rates per industry, email sent from manufacturing companies has the highest click-through rate of 9.31% while emails sent from health companies is 8.94%.

B2B email marketing statistics

• Among B2B marketers, 81% say that email newsletters are their top choice for content marketing.
• As many as 16% of the sent email does not reach the inbox of the recipient.

Email marketing device statistics

• Over 80% primarily use their mobile device to read their emails.
• Almost 1 in 5 campaigns are not optimised for mobile devices.
• About 42% delete emails that are not optimised for mobile devices.

Best day and time for email marketing

• A compilation of different studies shows that Tuesdays stand out as the best day to send newsletters. Thursdays come in as the second-best day, often followed by Wednesday.
• Keep in mind the the "best time" could vary a lot depending on your audience. So don't follow the above blindly; instead, you must find out what works best for your audience by testing.
• An analysis done by Hubspot showed that the peak time for opening emails during the day was at 11 am. An exception was Sundays when peak time is at 9 am.
• Weekends tend to have low open rates as people are busy running errands, socialising, etc. But for some industries, weekends could be their best sending days. So once again, you must test to understand what works best for your audience.

Email open rates by hour

Open rates and subject lines/preheader text

For both desktop and mobile devices, the subject line and preheader text are essential to the subscriber when deciding whether to open the email and engaging with the content. It is crucial to put effort into testing and optimising these parts thoroughly.

• Keep the subject line short! Many desktop clients will display up to 80 characters, but most mobile devices cut the subject line after only 30 characters.
• 82% of marketers keep their subject lines at 60 characters or less.
• The top reason (45%) for opening an email is who it's from, while 34% decide to open the mail based solely on the subject line.
• 69% of emails marked as SPAM are done so solely on the subject line.
• Most mobile preheader text is between 30 and 55 characters long.
• Be careful with what keywords you use in the subject line and preheader. It's been shown that words like "free", "reminder" and "percent off" negatively affect the open rates.
• Emails with personalised subject lines are 50% more likely to be opened.

Email personalisation stats

• Segmented personalised automated email messages average 46% higher open rates than regular marketing messages.
• Personalised emails deliver 6x higher transactional rates.
• Organisations using email personalisation generate 17% more revenue through their campaigns than the average marketer.

Conversion from emails

• In 2021 the average conversion rate from emails is 1,23% based on sent email and 14,65% based on click.
• The trend is that the click-to-conversion rate from emails is declining year by year. See figure below.

Email click to conversion rate by year

• The email type with the highest total revenue is shopping cart abandonment emails.
• According to a recent study, email accounted for 19.8% of all transactions - trailing only paid search (19.9%) and organic traffic (21.8%).

If you're interested in finding out more about email marketing and how your company can make use of it, make sure to take a look at our in-depth guide to email marketing. You can also get our downloadable guide with email marketing tips below. Enjoy!