Digital marketers send nearly a trillion emails every year. Budgets for email marketing continue to grow as email platforms become more robust, offering automation and greater integration with other channels. In some organizations, email marketing is a cornerstone, while in others, it has lost favor to newer channels. Regardless, email marketing is conducted in some capacity by almost any business.
The following list contains a combination of interesting and surprising statistics related to email marketing – covering everything from email marketing usage trends to list composition. The key takeaways from the list are the opportunities in terms of spam prevention, list hygiene, and measurement/optimization. Doing things that many of your competitors aren’t gives you an edge in the cluttered inbox.
1. Email marketing spending is predicted to rise to $2 billion dollars by the end of 2014 (Forrester)
2. 64.5% of B2B marketers plan to increase spending on email marketing in 2014 (eMarketer)
3. 55% of all business to business emails are marketing messages (Epsilon)
4. 30% of companies send more than half a million emails every month (Adestra)
5. Email marketing accounts for an average of 19% of digital marketing budgets for US B2B marketers (eMarketer)
6. On average, companies attribute 23% of their sales to email marketing (Adestra)
7. 44% of email recipients made at least one purchase in the previous year as a result of a promotional email (Convince and Convert)
8. Email beat out any other marketing channel with 68% of companies rating email as a positive source of ROI (Adestra)
9. In Q4 of 2013, the average B2B marketing click-through rate for was 2.1%, the average open rate was 20.7%, and the average click to open rate was 10% (Epsilon)
10. The average hard bounce rate was 0.70% in the US (Silverpop)
11. For every 10,000 emails sent in the US, there is an average of 15 unsubscribes and 4 complaints (Silverpop)
12. 35% of email recipients open email based on the subject line alone (Convince and Convert)
13. For B2B companies, subject lines that contained “money,” “revenue,” and “profit” performed the best. (Adestra)
14. Personalized subject lines are 22.2% more likely to be opened. (Adestra)
15. Subject lines fewer than 10 characters long had an open rate of 58%. (Adestra)
16. 69% of email recipients report email as spam based solely on the subject line (Convince and Convert)
17. 43% of email recipients will mark an email as spam based on the email “from” name or email address (Convince and Convert)
18. Emails optimized for image blocking increase ROI and estimated 9+% or more (Convince and Convert)
19. Only 42% of companies rated their email marketing performance above average. A miniscule 3% rated their efforts as “excellent” (Adestra)
20. 42% of the average email list is dormant (inactive for 12 or more months) (Epsilon)
21. 30% of subscribers change email addresses annually (Convince and Convert)
22. On average, 88% of a marketer’s email list has been on file for more than 3 months (Epsilon)
23. 76% of marketers say their email list is neutral or slowly growing. An additional 7% report that their list is shrinking (Marketing Sherpas)
24, 48% of companies believed they were using half or less of the email marketing capabilities provided by their platform (Adestra)
25. Quality of email databases, lack of strategy, and lack of segmentation were rated as the largest barriers to email marketing with 55%, 48%, and 42% identifying each, respectively (Adestra)
26. Only 17% of companies spend more than two hours per campaign on email optimization and reporting (Adestra)
27. Creating relevant and compelling email content was identified by 40% of marketers as the most difficult portion of email marketing. 51% said it was the most important (eMarketer)
28. 63% of marketers spend at least two hours per campaign on design and content (Adestra)
29. Lead scoring is integrated into email marketing efforts by only 17% of companies (Adestra)
30. 64% of marketers identified email personalization capabilities as an area for improvement in their platform (Adestra)
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