Email Marketing Statistics for Small Business Owners

Social media may be the shiny red ball in the marketing world. But the humble email has considerable power. In fact, 54% of small business owners still list email marketing as their most important tool for increasing sales.

We’ve compiled a list of email marketing statistics to help you establish an email marketing strategy. Use these stats to improve your email marketing, develop more leads, and make more sales with your email list. Let’s get started!

Email Marketing Statistics: An Overview

image: smallbiztrendsBusinesses employ email marketing not because it is more inexpensive than other marketing tactics, but for it offers a superb return on investment.

In fact, companies generate 42 dollars for every dollar they spend on email marketing. So there is no surprise that 81% of small businesses rely on email marketing to find customers.

Of course, marketers are exploring multiple marketing channels, like content marketing, social media marketing, and SEO to drive sales. But email marketing is still a goldmine for marketers.

The benefits of email marketing can be observed in the following email marketing stats from OptinMonster:

• 60% of consumers subscribe to companies’ email lists to keep tabs on promotional messages
• 44% of consumers check their emails to find out if there is any deal/discount.
• 60% of consumer state that they have made a purchase as a result of a promotional email

Do you wonder how much money businesses spend on email marketing?

According to WebFx, businesses expect to spend $9 to $1000 per month on email marketing if they self-manage their campaigns. And if they hire an agency, they can be spending $300 to $500 per month.

How many email users are out there? Do b2b marketers implement email marketing to generate leads? How b2c marketing see email marketing as a tool to grow sales? To answer questions like these, we have collected the following statistics:

Email Usage Statistics

image: emarketerThough marketing trend forecasters have stated many a time that email will be dead in coming years, email is going to stay. Why?

People prefer emails for both personal and professional communication. And emails are a popular way of business communication. In fact, 77% of employees prefer using emails.

Following are some key email statistics to prove why email marketing demands your focus:

• People who use emails are expected to reach 4481 million Worldwide in 2024 (Statista)
• US email users will be 81.2% of the total US population by 2024 (eMarketer)
• 65% of your customers check their email more than 3 times a day (EmailMonday)
• Email marketing is essential for customer retention and growth. 4 out 5 respondents said they would rather leave social media marketing than email marketing (Litmus)

It is not like just the number of email users is growing. People are spending a significant amount of time checking emails. According to a report, Americans spend a whopping 5 hours a day on emails.

With people spending a big time on emails, marketers are leveraging email marketing to serve their audiences.

The Content Marketing Institute reports that 87% of marketers use email marketing to nurture an audience.

image: contentmarketinginstituteWhen it comes to the user base, email outscores social media. According to OptinMonster:

• 91% of people of age (15-24) prefer email, while 88% of people of the same age group use social media
• 93.4% of people of age (25-44) make use of email, but 78% of people of the same age group utilize social media

image: optinmonsterAs the age increases, social media users start to dwindle rapidly. For the age 65+, only 37% of people use social media. However, 85.5% of people use emails.

Being a small business owner who wants to implement an effective online marketing strategy, you cannot ignore email marketing considering these stats.

B2B Email Marketing Statistics

image: contentmarketinginstituteB2B email marketing is not the same as B2C email marketing, except for the tactics b2b and b2c marketers employ to avoid getting landed in the Spam folder of receivers.

Be it increasing open rates or writing irresistible subject lines, B2B email marketers implement different strategies than b2c marketers.

Following are some interesting findings from SuperOffice’s Email Benchmark Report:

• 77% of B2B email marketers leverage email marketing to drive sales and visits to their websites
• 89% of all b2b emails are sent from a company’s name
• B2B companies, on average, send one email marketing campaign every 25 days

Small business owners who are active in the b2b domain can benefit from the above stats. For example, most b2b emails are sent from a company’s name. But receivers respond more positively to people than they do to a company’s name. So, using a personal name can help you increase the open rates and click-through rates of your email campaign.

Also, sending email marketing campaigns more than once every 25 days can help you generate more leads.

However, you should avoid spamming your audience’s inboxes with promotional emails that don’t offer any value. Create useful content that educates your audience, and send it to your subscribers.

Wondering if b2b marketers use emails to share useful content? The answer is yes.

According to a report from the Content Marketing Institute, 87% of b2b marketers employ emails to share content with their audiences.

Following are useful email marketing stats on the use of email in b2b marketing, which you need to know:

• 81% of b2b marketers say email newsletter is their most-used form of content marketing (CMI)
• 88% of email marketers consider email as their most effective lead generation tactic (Invesp)
• 64% of b2b companies use a dedicated email marketing platform (CMI)

image: invespcroIf you are interested in knowing open rates of b2b emails or email frequency, then the following stats from Emfluence will certainly help your business plan better campaigns:

• Unique open rate for b2b emails is 22%
• Average click rate for b2b email is 6%
• Average bounce rate for b2b emails is 1.2%

According to another data set reported by Campaign Monitor, the average open rate for b2b campaigns is 15.1% and the click-through rate is 3.2%.

To increase the open and click rate of your promotional emails, you should follow the best email marketing practices, such as writing personalized subject lines, including 1 call-to-action, and running segmented email campaigns, etc.

B2C Email Marketing Stats

image: aweberIf you are working in the B2C segment, including marketing emails in your marketing arsenal can be a good strategy to reach out to your audience. Why?

People spend 2.5 hours per weekday checking emails, reports a survey from Adobe. But it doesn’t mean you should make your email subscribers inboxes flooded. Doing so is a surefire way to lose subscribers.

The same Adobe report also mentioned the following email marketing sins that small business owners must avoid committing:

• You should not send spam email that doesn’t provide your audience with any value. 45% of respondents don’t like frequent emails, which trigger them to end a relationship with a brand
• Strictly avoid recommending products that don’t match your audience’s interest. 33% of respondents cited this as a reason for unsubscribing from a business
• You should never send expired offers to your audience. 22% of respondents unsubscribe from businesses because of this reason

Are you thinking about how many businesses use email marketing? The answer is 69% of businesses spend time and money on email marketing, as reported by The Manifest. And the 41% of businesses send emails weekly, noted the same report.

image: themanifestHere are some additional email marketing statistics that you need to know:

• 47% of recipients open their emails because of the email subject line (Optinmonster)
• The overall average delivery rate touches 98.2% (Dot Digital)
• The best day to send emails is Tuesday (CoSchedule)
• On average, there are 43.85 characters in a subject line (AWeber)
• 42.3% of people subscribe to an email list to know about saving and discount (The Inbox Report)

When small businesses try to reach out to their customers through email marketing, they want to achieve higher open rates, higher click through rates, and good conversion rates. But what are benchmark numbers to gauge the success of their segmented campaigns?

The following stats from Get Response can provide you with a head start:

• Overall average email open rate is 22.02%
• Average click-through-rate is 2.13%
• Average rate of spam emails is 0.01%

Whether you indulge in sending emails to create brand awareness for your newly launched product or you want to inform them about new discounts, email subject lines play an important role in the success of your campaigns.

Just randomly throwing words like Free, Sale, or Bonanza won’t make the cut. You should pay attention to the language your email recipients use and carefully pick the words. Make sure you do A/B testing as it is a surefire way to boost conversion rate.

If you’re running an eCommerce store, email marketing can also help you boost your conversion rate.

image: salecycleThe following stats from SaleCycle will make you understand why marketers rely on sending emails to grow sales:

• Shopping cart abandonment emails convert 6.33% of consumers if you send them emails after 1 hour they leave your website
• Segmented email campaigns boost conversion rate by 18%

When you’re sending abandonment emails, you should make sure that you send more than one email. This is because a series of 3 abandonment emails bring in 69% more orders than 1 email, finds Omnisend.

Are you in a dilemma of whether you should use a video in your emails or not? The answer is Yes. Email recipients love video emails. WordStream reports that video emails secure 96% more CTR than non-video emails.

Mobile Email Marketing Statistics

image: idgThanks to the deep penetration of smartphones and cheap data plans, mobile surfers have outgrown desktop surfers. As a result, your customers check their email more on their smartphones than on desktops.

According to a report from uplandAdestra, 62% of email opens are from mobile devices. Therefore, you must ensure that marketing email campaigns are optimized for mobile devices. The same report also notes that Apple iPhone, with 35% of all email opens happening on this platform, is the most popular mobile client for the email reading.

Here are some additional mobile emails marketing stats:

• Your customers would like to receive business emails that they can easily read on devices of all screen sizes. So there is no surprise that implementing a mobile-responsive email design can boost unique mobile click by 15% (MailChimp)
• 1 in 5 emails is not optimized for mobile devices (Superoffice)
• 68% to 79% of customers will delete your emails within 3 seconds if emails are not optimized for mobile (Adestra)

Business owners are increasingly adopting responsive design for their emails to meet the latest mobile technology trends. As a result, most customers don’t face any difficulty in checking emails on their smartphones. According to EmailMonday research, only 39% of respondents say that email campaigns are not well designed for mobile devices.

If your customers are young, you cannot ignore optimizing your emails for mobile phones 40% of people under 18 or under will always open their email first on their smartphones, reports Campaign Monitor.

Following are two important stats from Fluent on email marketing for mobile:

• Mobile emails enable your business to reach customers anywhere. 3 in 5 of your customers check their emails on the go
• 75% of your customers mostly use their smartphones to check personal email

image: fluentcoWant to get a higher open rate for smartphone/tablet email marketing campaigns?

Here are some tips that can help you:

• Shorten subject lines
• Segment your email address list
• Write for just one person (personalize your email campaigns)
• Craft irresistible preheader text

Last but not least, write concise email copy. After all, nobody loves skimming through a wall of text on their smartphones.

Cold Email Marketing Statistics

image: liveclickerRunning a cold email campaign is often like flying in the dark, shooting randomly, and expecting to hit the target. However, if you know the target well, it improves your chances of hitting it.

Following are some key stats to improve your cold email marketing:

• Start using the recipient’s name in the subject line of your email to increase open rates because the name of customers in subject lines boost personalization that can increase open rates by 26% (Campaign Monitor)
• Using ‘Fwd’ or ‘Re’ in the subject line of your email marketing campaign can increase email opens (Yesware)
• If you want your consumers to reply to your cold email campaign, you should send more follow-ups. 4-7 follow-up emails in the sequence can give you 3 times more reply rate than that of sending 1-3 follow-ups (Woodpecker)

It is worth mentioning that non-segmented email campaigns don’t earn good email engagement. So your target email address list should be tightly defined. Narrowing down your target can significantly increase the open rate of your cold email marketing campaigns, notes the Woodpecker research.

Also, you should make sure that you do A/B testing of cold emails sent to your consumers. Doing so will maximize the success of your email marketing campaigns. According to MailChimp, eCommerce companies that A/B test their emails earn 20% more revenue on average.

Here are some additional stats to improve your cold email marketing:

• Offering discounts and offers on relevant products in your emails can be a good way to delight your consumers. 55% of consumers like to receive relevant products and offers in emails (Live Clicker)
• Promotional emails can sway millennials’ minds. 68% of millennials say promotional emails have influenced their purchase decisions (Fluent)
• Using 98-111 characters in email subject lines can help you get a 54% open rate (Prospect.io)

image: fluentcoRegardless of what many people say, cold emailing is not dead yet. However, non-segmented emails sent to prospects without personalization don’t make the cut.

Following email marketing laws, segmenting your audience, writing irresistible subject lines, personalizing your message, and using a call-to-action strategically can certainly improve your cold email marketing success.

Email Marketing ROI Statistics

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Are you pondering whether email marketing is really worth it? The answer is a big resounding YES.

According to Litmus research, marketers receive $42 for every dollar they spend on email marketing. Some industries even see a higher return on their investment in email marketing.

The Litmus research further notes that every dollar spent on emails sent brings in:

• $40 in the software and technology industry
• $45 in retail, eCommerce, media, publishing, events, sports, and entertainment
• $53 in travel, tourism, and hospitality

Business owners are always in search of ways to increase the ROI of their email marketing campaigns.

image: litmusHere are some additional statistics from Litmus research to help you boost your email marketing ROI:

• Make the double opt-in process a part of your strategy. Using the double opt-in process can increase your ROI by 13% as compared to implementing just one opt-in process
• Always do A/B testing of your email marketing campaign. Businesses that conduct A/B testing boost their ROI by 37% as compared to those who never A/B test their campaigns
• Using Dynamic content can boost your ROI. Companies that leverage dynamic content earn 22% more ROI than companies that never or rarely use dynamic content

image: litmusAs email marketing offers handsome ROI, SMBs are increasingly making it a part of their marketing mix. In fact, 81% SMBs leverage the power of email marketing for customer acquisition and 80% of SMBs implement it for customer retention, reports Emarsys.

When you are looking at the ROI of your email campaigns, you cannot ignore the power of automation. According to Campaign Monitor, automated email campaigns drive 320% more revenue than non-automated ones.

What is a Good Open Rate for Email Campaigns?

A good open rate for email campaigns is 17.13% on average across all industries.

The subject line, the sender’s reputation, the time of the day, and the day of the week, are key factors that determine email open rates.

Also, email open rates vary with industries. For example, religious organizations have a 28.44% open rate and emails from automotive services have a 10.16% open rate.

The average click-through rate is 10.65% across all industries. Email click-through rate tells how many recipients have clicked call-to-action in the emails. (Source: Constant Contact)

How Many Emails Does the Average Person Receive Per Day?

The average person receives more than 121 emails per day.

With so many emails flooding the inbox, receivers don’t open all the emails they get. Many of these emails find their way into the spam folder.

If you’re curious about the top spam content category, the answer is healthcare.

As people surf the Internet via multiple devices, the mobile opening is not the same across devices.

Mobile devices rules when it comes to opening emails. In fact, 55.6% of emails are opened on mobile devices. 28% of emails are accessed on webmail, while 16% of emails are opened on desktop computers. (Source: Lifewire)

What To Do Next

It’s time to get to work. Small business statistics like these can help you with your email marketing. Use these stats to take marketing from your email list to the next level.

Image: Depositphotos

This article, “Email Marketing Statistics for Small Business Owners” was first published on Small Business Trends