Every so often, I sit down on the Compu-Mail “Collaborative Couches” (pictured to the right) to catch up on my reading.
Recently, the 2015 Essential Guide to Email Marketing came across my path, and I found some interesting stats that inspired me to compile an updated list of email marketing statistics and resources for 2016.
Complementing our list of stats and benchmarks for email marketing best practices as well as our previous Top 30 Email Marketing Statistics, here are a few new things we’ve learned about email marketing.
At A Glance
- Email marketing ROI remains around 4300%.
- There are 2.6 billion email users worldwide.
- Total worldwide email traffic (including business and consumer emails) is estimated to be over 215 billion emails/day by year-end 2016.
- Annual growth rate of business and consumer emails is estimated to be an average of 4.6%.
The Bottom Line
The number of email accounts that exist is only growing, meaning there’s more and more consumers to market to every day.
Consumer Preferences
- Nearly half of the worldwide population will be using email by year-end 2020.
- 7 in 10 adults prefer email as their primary marketing communications channel.
- 91% of B2B customers indicate that they like to receive promotional emails from companies they do business with.
The Bottom Line
Consumers like email (when it’s done right).
Traffic and Frequency
- Email traffic is up 16% year-over-year.
- 86% of consumers would like monthly emails.
- 61% of consumers would like weekly emails.
The Bottom Line
How often you should send emails depends entirely on your audience and the nature of your products. For more on email best practices, check out HubSpot’s email marketing blog.
Open and Click Rates
- Overall (Unique) Opens average at 21.0% across U.S., EMEA, United Kingdom, Canada, APAC.
- Overall Clicks-To-Opens average at 12.6% (of total emails opened) across U.S., EMEA, United Kingdom, Canada, APAC.
- Overall Click-Throughs average at 3.2% (of total emails sent) across U.S., EMEA, United Kingdom, Canada, APAC.
- Email messages that are automatically sent in response to a customer action (i.e. making a purchase or downloading content) see 70.5% higher open rates and 152% higher click-through rates than standard email messages.
The Bottom Line
Automatic email messages perform better than other email messages, because the customer is expecting them and therefore more receptive to their message. To improve your nontransactional email messages, try HubSpot’s 19 Simple Email Marketing Tips to Improve Your Email Open and Click through Rates.
Deliverability
- 79% of email marketing messages reach inboxes. 15% email marketing messages are missing/unaccounted for.
- 15% email marketing messages are missing/unaccounted for.
- 7% of email marketing messages are designated as spam, blocking them from the recipient’s inbox.
- Overall Hard Bounce Rates average at 0.547% across U.S., EMEA, United Kingdom, Canada, APAC.
- Overall Unsubscribe Rates average at 0.130% across U.S., EMEA, United Kingdom, Canada, APAC.
- Overall Spam Complaint Rates average at .027% across U.S., EMEA, United Kingdom, Canada, APAC. These messages are delivered to the inbox, but marked as spam by the recipient.
The Bottom Line
Not every email makes it to its intended recipient. Make sure you are designing your email with the spam filter in mind, so that’s not where your email ends up. (And by the way, making it easier to unsubscribe is a good thing. Only send emails to customers who have given you permission to do so, and you’ll see better results.)
