125 Email Marketing Statistics October 2026

Email marketing statistics from 2025 and 2026 describe a channel that is cheap to run and harder to get right than it was five years ago. Budgets are holding up. Email took 7.4% of total digital spend in 2025 and was the only owned or earned channel to grow (Gartner, Jun 2025).

Every figure below links to the organisation that produced it: mailbox providers, regulators, research firms and the email platforms that measured their own send data. Vendor benchmarks are labelled as vendor research, and open rates carry a warning, because Apple's Mail Privacy Protection now counts many automatic opens as real ones. For the wider search picture see our SEO statistics hub, and for outreach reply rates see cold email statistics.

What return does email marketing deliver?

Email's return is high enough that few channels come close. The headline average hides a wide spread, though, and a fifth of marketing leaders still don't measure it at all.

What is the average email marketing ROI?

Most companies earn many times what they spend, and a small group earns far more. Those figures come from teams that measure email at all, and many still judge it by opens and clicks.

• 35% of companies get $10 to $36 back for every $1 spent on email (Litmus, Jul 2025).
• Another 30% get $36 to $50 for each $1 (Litmus, Jul 2025).
• 5% get more than $50 per $1 (Litmus, Jul 2025).
• Omnisend's own analysis puts its merchants at $76 per $1 spent on email campaigns (Omnisend, Aug 2026).
• The top 8% of email programs reach an ROI of 45:1 or better (Litmus, Jul 2026).

Measurement is moving from opens toward revenue, but slowly.

• 21% of marketing leaders don't measure email ROI at all, down from 36% in 2023 (Litmus, Jul 2025).
• 44% of teams track MQLs or conversion rates from marketing emails (Litmus, Jul 2025).
• Use of multi-channel attribution and MQLs to measure email jumped 22% year over year (Litmus, Jul 2026).

Which industries get the highest email ROI?

Retail sits at the top, and a looser opt-in policy correlates with higher returns. The teams furthest ahead with AI also cluster at the top of the range.

• Retail, ecommerce and consumer goods brands report an email ROI of 45:1 (Litmus, Jul 2025).
• Marketing, PR and advertising agencies come next at 42:1 (Litmus, Jul 2025).
• Software and technology companies report an email ROI of 36:1 (Litmus, Jul 2025).
• Media, publishing, events, sports and entertainment trail at 32:1 (Litmus, Jul 2025).
• Single opt-in programs show an 80% higher return than double opt-in programs (Litmus, Jun 2025).
• Advanced AI adopters are 75% more likely to achieve an email ROI above 45:1 (Litmus, Jul 2026).

How much do companies spend on email?

Email holds a steady slice of marketing budgets, and most marketers plan to add to it. It is also the one owned channel whose budget held while the others were cut.

• Email makes up about a fifth of UK marketing budgets (DMA, Mar 2026).
• 66% of UK marketers expect their email budget to increase over the next year (DMA, Mar 2026).
• Budget allocations to owned and earned channels fell 9% year over year, with email the one exception (Gartner, Jun 2025).

What open, click and unsubscribe rates are normal?

Open rates are the least trustworthy number in email, and the benchmarks disagree by more than 10 points depending on who measures. Compare yourself with one platform's benchmark at a time, and trust clicks and conversions more than opens.

What is a good email open rate in 2026?

Just under a third for ecommerce and small-business senders. Platforms built around newsletters report higher rates.

• The average campaign open rate across Klaviyo's ecommerce customers is 31%, and the top 10% reach 45.1% (Klaviyo, Feb 2026).
• The average open rate across Constant Contact customers was 30.8% in the first quarter of 2026 (Constant Contact, May 2026).
• Constant Contact's top performers email about three times a week and see open rates of 48% (Constant Contact, May 2026).
• Open rates on Omnisend rose for a fifth straight year, from 26.6% in 2024 to 30.7% in 2025 (Omnisend, Aug 2026).
• Mailchimp's all-user average open rate was 35.63%, on data as of December 2023 (Mailchimp, Dec 2023).

Read any open rate with care. Apple Mail and Gmail handle about nine opens in ten, and Apple's privacy protection records many automatic opens as real ones, so test in those two apps first and judge results by clicks.

• Gmail accounts for 27.03% of tracked opens (Litmus, Aug 2026).
• Desktop Outlook accounts for 5.83% of opens and Yahoo Mail for 2.59% (Litmus, Aug 2026).
• Apple Mail and Gmail together account for nearly 90% of the market (Litmus, Aug 2026).

What are typical click and unsubscribe rates?

Only a small share of recipients click, and on Omnisend the clicks that do happen convert better than they used to. Unsubscribes rose faster than clicks, which says more people are leaving lists they no longer read.

• The average email click rate was 2.09% in 2025, up from 2% in 2024 (MailerLite, Apr 2026).
• The average click-to-open rate rose to 6.81% in 2025 from 5.63% (MailerLite, Apr 2026).
• The average unsubscribe rate was 0.22% in 2025, more than double 2024's 0.08% (MailerLite, Apr 2026).
• Mailchimp's all-user average click rate was 2.62% (Mailchimp, Dec 2023).
• Click-to-conversion on Omnisend jumped 53%, from 5.9% to 9%, even as click rates fell (Omnisend, Aug 2026).

Which industries and regions open the most email?

Religious and faith-based senders get the most opens on both MailerLite and Constant Contact. Travel and manufacturing sit near the bottom, and in Omnisend's data UK shoppers convert clicks best.

• Religious organisations had the highest open rate at 55.71%, and travel and transportation the lowest at 30.10% (MailerLite, Apr 2026).
• Australia led the regions with a 47.69% open rate, and LATAM trailed at 31.97% (MailerLite, Apr 2026).
• Faith-based organisations average a 41.81% open rate on Constant Contact, against 24.84% for manufacturing and distribution (Constant Contact, May 2026).
• UK shoppers converted from 16.54% of email clicks, the highest click-to-conversion rate of any market (Omnisend, Aug 2026).

Which emails earn the most revenue?

Automation is where email earns its reputation. Triggered messages are a sliver of volume and a large share of revenue, because they arrive when the reader already wants something.

How do automated flows compare with campaigns?

Flows beat campaigns on every metric that tracks money, and the gap is wide on both Omnisend and Klaviyo.

• Automations were 2% of Omnisend email sends but drove 30% of email revenue (Omnisend, Aug 2026).
• Automated emails earned 16 times more per send than scheduled campaigns (Omnisend, Aug 2026).
• Automated messages had 24% higher open rates, 6 times stronger click engagement and 19 times higher conversion rates than campaigns (Omnisend, Aug 2026).
• Revenue per recipient from Klaviyo flows is nearly 18 times higher than from campaigns (Klaviyo, Jan 2026).
• Flows average a 5.58% click rate against 1.69% for campaigns (Klaviyo, Jan 2026).
• Flows reach 13 times the placed-order rate of campaigns (Klaviyo, Jan 2026).

Brands are spreading email across the customer journey, yet batch-and-blast is far from gone.

• 74% to 83% of UK marketers use email at every stage of the customer journey (DMA, Mar 2026).
• Post-purchase email use rose 24 points and customer service email use rose 22 points (DMA, Mar 2026).
• Bulk, unsegmented sends still make up 33% of email activity, even as automated emails grow (DMA, Mar 2026).

Which automated emails perform best?

Cart recovery and welcome series do most of the work. Back-in-stock and birthday emails are smaller programs with outsized results, and flows are better than campaigns at winning new buyers.

• Abandoned cart and welcome messages produced 76% of all automation-generated orders (Omnisend, Aug 2026).
• Back-in-stock emails converted best of any automation, at 6.46% (Omnisend, Aug 2026).
• Birthday emails produced an average order value of $744.37, more than four times the average (Omnisend, Aug 2026).
• Nearly 48% of flow revenue comes from new buyers, against 16% for campaigns (Klaviyo, Jan 2026).
• The top 10% of Klaviyo flows reach revenue per recipient as high as $7.79 (Klaviyo, Jan 2026).

Does personalization still change email results?

Most marketers say they personalize, and most also admit their campaigns are still generic. What holds them back is data, and B2B buyers punish the result by avoiding suppliers who send irrelevant outreach. Teams know what they want to send and can't get at the customer context they need to send it.

How many marketers personalize email well?

Very few, and they cite missing data as the reason. In B2B, email is where most personalization happens, and most B2B teams call theirs basic.

• 83% of marketers say customers now expect two-way conversations with brands (Salesforce, Feb 2026).
• 69% of marketers struggle to respond promptly because they can't access the context they need (Salesforce, Feb 2026).
• 78% of marketers need more personalized content than their teams can produce (Salesforce, Feb 2026).
• Nearly all marketers (98%) hit barriers to personalization, most often data problems (Salesforce, Feb 2026).
• Teams with well-unified data are 42% more likely to regularly respond to customers (Salesforce, Feb 2026).
• Among B2B marketers who personalize, 85% do it in email campaigns, far ahead of social media at 34% (Content Marketing Institute, Oct 2025).
• 59% of B2B marketers call their personalization basic (Content Marketing Institute, Oct 2025).

Does AI personalization lift email clicks?

For product recommendations, yes. Business leaders expect to move from reacting to customers to predicting what they want, while in the UK discounts are doing more of the work than personalization.

• Emails with AI product recommendations average a 3.75% click rate, and 8.79% for top performers (Klaviyo, Jan 2026).
• 89% of business decision-makers believe AI-driven personalization will be critical to their success (Twilio Segment, Jun 2024).
• 86% of business leaders expect a shift from reacting to predicting what customers want (Twilio Segment, Jun 2024).
• 36% of B2B marketers use AI tools to optimize and personalize email campaigns (Content Marketing Institute, Oct 2025).
• Discounts now drive 54% of UK email acquisition, up 18 points, while personalization regresses (DMA, Mar 2026).

How do B2B buyers want to hear from vendors?

On their own terms, after they've done their own research. In B2B, email works best as something the buyer signed up for, such as a newsletter, rather than as a sales sequence, and a B2B newsletter is one of the few formats marketers rate highly for thought leadership.

• 61% of B2B buyers prefer a rep-free buying experience (Gartner, Jun 2025).
• Irrelevant outreach makes 73% of B2B buyers actively avoid a supplier (Gartner, Jun 2025).
• 69% of B2B buyers find inconsistencies between a vendor's website and what its sellers tell them (Gartner, Jun 2025).
• Email newsletters rank among the most effective thought leadership channels for 54% of B2B marketers (Content Marketing Institute, Oct 2025).

That solo research runs through search engines and AI assistants, usually before a buyer subscribes to anything. The B2B SEO statistics page covers how it happens.

What does it take to reach the inbox?

Sent, delivered and inboxed are three different numbers, and senders lose mail at each step. Inbox placement improved in 2025. Since 2024, though, whether marketing email arrives depends more on Gmail, Yahoo and Outlook than on any regulator, and they reject mail that doesn't comply.

What is the average inbox placement rate?

Most legitimate email gets there, and the share improved over the last year. List quality is the other half of the number, because lists lose around a quarter of their addresses every year.

• The global inbox placement rate was 83.5% in Validity's previous benchmark (Validity, Mar 2025).
• Worldwide, 6.1% of legitimate email lands in spam and 6.6% goes missing (Validity, Mar 2026).
• North American senders reach the inbox 86.7% of the time, with 6.8% going to spam (Validity, Mar 2026).
• Europe leads on inbox placement at 91.1% (Validity, Mar 2026).
• Transportation senders lead all industries with 97.2% inbox placement (Validity, Mar 2026).
• Media had the lowest delivery rate of the top ten industries at 95.05%, while air freight and logistics had the highest at 99.25% (Sinch Mailgun, Apr 2026).
• At least 23% of an email list decays within a year, down from 28% in 2024 (ZeroBounce, Feb 2026).
• Only 62% of the 11 billion+ addresses submitted to ZeroBounce in 2025 were valid (ZeroBounce, Feb 2026).
• ZeroBounce found more than 155 million known complainers in the lists it cleaned (ZeroBounce, Feb 2026).

What do Gmail, Yahoo and Outlook require from bulk senders?

Authenticate, make unsubscribing one click, and keep complaints under Gmail's and Yahoo's spam-rate limits. Authentication is spreading, but most domains that publish a DMARC policy still only monitor.

• Gmail treats anyone sending close to 5,000 messages a day to personal accounts as a bulk sender, and the status is permanent (Google, Nov 2025).
• Gmail requires bulk senders to keep reported spam rates below 0.30% and recommends staying below 0.10% (Google, Feb 2024).
• Since November 2025, Gmail has ramped up enforcement with temporary and permanent rejections of non-compliant mail (Google, Nov 2025).
• Yahoo requires senders to keep spam complaint rates below 0.3% (Yahoo, Feb 2024).
• Yahoo requires unsubscribe requests to be honored within 2 days (Yahoo, Feb 2024).
• Outlook began enforcing SPF, DKIM and DMARC for domains sending more than 5,000 emails a day on May 5, 2025 (Microsoft, Apr 2025).
• Non-compliant high-volume mail to Outlook is rejected with error 550 5.7.515 (Microsoft, Apr 2025).

Among the top 1.8 million domains, DMARC adoption rose from 27.2% to 47.7% between 2023 and 2025 (EasyDMARC, Jul 2025). Most of them stop at monitoring: 508,269 use a monitoring-only policy, against 350,513 with active enforcement (EasyDMARC, Jul 2025).

Deliverability problems hit outreach hardest, because cold inboxes have no history. Reply and bounce data for outreach is on the cold email statistics page.

What does spam and email fraud cost?

Close to half of all traffic is spam, and email fraud losses keep rising. Regulators fine senders rarely, but the fines are large, and most target missing consent or broken unsubscribe links.

• Spam's share of global email traffic fell 2.28 percentage points in 2025 but peaked at 49.26% in the fourth quarter (Kaspersky, Feb 2026).
• Kaspersky users encountered over 144 million malicious and potentially unwanted email attachments in 2025, up 15% on 2024 (Kaspersky, Feb 2026).
• Russia sent 32.50% of the world's spam in 2025, followed by China at 19.10% and the US at 10.57% (Kaspersky, Feb 2026).
• The FBI received 191,561 phishing and spoofing complaints in 2025 (FBI IC3, Apr 2026).
• Reported phishing and spoofing losses tripled from $70.0 million in 2024 to $215.8 million in 2025 (FBI IC3, Apr 2026).
• Business email compromise cost US victims $3.05 billion across 24,768 complaints in 2025 (FBI IC3, Apr 2026).
• US law requires opt-out requests to be honored within 10 business days (FTC, Jan 2024).
• France's CNIL fined Orange €50 million, in part for showing ads between emails in its webmail without consent (CNIL, Dec 2024).
• More than 7.8 million people saw the ads inserted into their Orange inboxes (CNIL, Dec 2024).
• Australia's ACMA issued Commonwealth Bank an A$7,502,610 penalty for marketing emails and SMS sent without consent or a working unsubscribe (ACMA, Oct 2024).
• Lululemon Australia received an A$702,900 penalty for marketing emails without a functional unsubscribe facility (ACMA, Mar 2026).

Where is email still growing?

Email still reaches most internet users, and the growth is in newsletters people choose to read and in AI inside email teams. Very few readers pay, so list size and niche decide who makes money from a newsletter.

How many people read email?

Most internet users do, and the biggest senders move tens of billions of messages a year. On beehiiv alone, those sends reach hundreds of millions of readers, and a large share of them get opened.

• 82% of people aged 16 to 74 in the EU sent or received emails in 2025 (Eurostat, Dec 2025).
• Sinch Mailgun processed more than 400 billion emails across its ten highest-volume industries in 2025 (Sinch Mailgun, Apr 2026).
• Omnisend's 150,000 ecommerce brands sent 27 billion emails in 2025 (Omnisend, Aug 2026).
• Publishers on beehiiv sent 28 billion emails in 2025 and reached more than 255 million unique readers (beehiiv, Jan 2026).
• Newsletter open rates on beehiiv passed 41% (beehiiv, Jan 2026).
• Newsletters sent by email programs rose 12% in 2026 from 2025 (Litmus, Jul 2026).

How do paid newsletters make money?

Subscriptions now dominate creator income, but most readers never pay. The spread between niches is wide, and investing newsletters convert far better than the median.

• The median free-to-paid conversion rate on beehiiv is 0.62%, or about 6 paying readers per 1,000 subscribers (beehiiv, Jun 2026).
• The top 10% of investing newsletters convert 18.69% of readers to paid, against a median of 0.84% (beehiiv, Jun 2026).
• Subscriptions grew from roughly 30% to about 85% of total creator revenue on beehiiv (beehiiv, Jun 2026).
• Monthly billing was about 70% of subscription revenue in early 2025, and annual plans overtook it by mid-2025 (beehiiv, Jun 2026).

How are email teams using AI?

AI has shortened email production from weeks to days. Adoption is broad and deep use is rare, and basics such as accessibility still fail.

• 78% of email teams now produce an email in three days or less (Litmus, Jul 2026).
• The number of marketers using generative AI for copy, images, personalization, analysis and A/B testing rose 340% in 2025 (Litmus, Feb 2026).
• 70% of email marketers expect up to half of their email operations to be AI-driven (Litmus, Feb 2026).
• 62% of UK marketers claim good or advanced AI capabilities, but only 34% to 50% use AI for key email tasks (DMA, Mar 2026).
• 75% of marketers have adopted AI (Salesforce, Feb 2026).
• Only 13% of marketers use agentic AI, and those teams report a 20% average bump in ROI (Salesforce, Feb 2026).
• Advanced AI adopters are 54% more likely to follow WCAG accessibility standards (Litmus, Jul 2026).
• Only 21 of the emails the Email Markup Consortium tested passed every automated accessibility check (Email Markup Consortium, May 2025).

Methodology and Sources

We include a statistic only when we can trace it to the organisation that produced the data and open the page or PDF that contains it. Roundup and "statistics" pages are never used as sources. Platform benchmarks from Klaviyo, Omnisend, MailerLite, Mailchimp, Constant Contact, Sinch Mailgun, ZeroBounce, beehiiv and Litmus are vendor research based on each company's own customers, so their numbers are not blended with one another. Each figure is dated by when the data was published. This page is reviewed monthly, and superseded figures are replaced.

Sources

• ACMA, Investigations into spam and telemarketing
• beehiiv, The State of Newsletters 2026
• beehiiv, The State of Paid Newsletters 2026
• CNIL, Advertisements inserted among emails: ORANGE fined €50 million
• Constant Contact, What Is a Good Open Rate for Email
• Content Marketing Institute, B2B Content and Marketing Trends: Insights for 2026
• DMA, Marketer Email Tracker 2026
• EasyDMARC, 2025 DMARC Adoption Report
• Email Markup Consortium, Accessibility Report 2025
• Eurostat, Digital economy and society statistics: households and individuals
• FBI Internet Crime Complaint Center, 2025 IC3 Annual Report
• FTC, CAN-SPAM Act: A Compliance Guide for Business
• Gartner, Digital Channels Account for 61.1% of Total Marketing Spend
• Gartner, 61% of B2B Buyers Prefer a Rep-Free Buying Experience
• Google, Email sender guidelines
• Google, Email sender guidelines FAQ
• Kaspersky, Spam and phishing report for 2025
• Kaspersky, 15% growth in malicious email attacks in 2025
• Klaviyo, 2026 email marketing benchmarks by industry
• Klaviyo, Email marketing benchmarks 2026: open, click and conversion rates
• Litmus, Email client market share
• Litmus, Email marketing ROI
• Litmus, The ROI of Email Marketing infographic
• Litmus, State of Email reports 2025 to 2026
• Litmus, State of Email 2026
• Litmus, How to use AI in email marketing
• Mailchimp, Email marketing benchmarks and industry statistics
• MailerLite, Email marketing benchmarks by industry and region
• Microsoft, Outlook's new requirements for high-volume senders
• Omnisend, 2026 ecommerce marketing report
• Radicati Group, Email Statistics Report 2024 to 2028
• Salesforce, State of Marketing, tenth edition (news release)
• Salesforce, 5 hard truths from the tenth State of Marketing report
• Sinch Mailgun, Email Impact Report: email benchmarks
• Twilio Segment, State of Personalization 2024
• Validity, Email deliverability benchmarks
• Validity, Viajar Barato customer story (2025 benchmark baseline)
• Yahoo, Sender best practices
• ZeroBounce, Email List Decay Report 2026

Glossary

• BEC: business email compromise, fraud where an attacker impersonates a colleague or supplier by email
• CAN-SPAM: the US law that sets rules for commercial email
• CTOR: click-to-open rate, clicks as a share of opens
• DKIM: DomainKeys Identified Mail, a signature that proves an email wasn't altered and came from the domain
• DMARC: Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting and Conformance, a policy telling mailbox providers what to do with mail that fails SPF or DKIM
• Flow: an automated email triggered by a customer action, such as a welcome or abandoned-cart email
• MPP: Apple Mail Privacy Protection, which preloads emails and records opens that may not be real
• MQL: marketing qualified lead
• RPR: revenue per recipient
• SPF: Sender Policy Framework, a DNS record listing the servers allowed to send for a domain
• WCAG: Web Content Accessibility Guidelines