Email Marketing Statistics for 2026: 50+ Data Points That Should Actually Change How You Send
Email marketing isn't declining. It's fragmenting. The marketers who understand the data behind that shift are the ones pulling ahead, and the ones still chasing vanity metrics are wondering why their campaigns feel stuck.
We pulled together 50+ statistics from industry research published in 2024 and 2025 to give you a grounded, practical view of where email marketing stands right now. But this isn't just a list of numbers. Each section connects the data to the decisions you're probably making (or avoiding) every week.
Let's get into it.
The Size of the Opportunity (And Why It Still Matters)
Before we talk strategy, let's talk scale. Email reaches more people, more reliably, than any other marketing channel available to you.
There are roughly 4.6 billion email users worldwide as of 2025, according to Statista, and that number is projected to reach 4.89 billion by 2027. To put that in context, that's more than half the world's population. No social media platform comes close to that kind of reach.
The daily volume is staggering too. An estimated 376 billion emails are sent and received every day in 2025, and that figure is expected to climb past 408 billion by 2027 (Statista). The U.S. leads globally, sending roughly 9.7 billion emails per day.
Here's what those numbers actually tell you: email isn't losing ground to newer channels. It's growing alongside them. And while that growth means more competition in every inbox, it also means your audience is still there, still checking, still engaging. The channel itself isn't the problem. What you do with it is what matters.
ROI: Email's Competitive Advantage Is Still Enormous
This is the stat that keeps email at the center of every serious marketing budget. Email marketing generates an average return of $36 to $42 for every dollar spent, depending on the study. That translates to a 3,600% to 4,200% ROI, which consistently outperforms paid search, social media advertising, and display ads.
Some segments do even better. Retail, ecommerce, and consumer goods companies report an average email ROI of $45 per dollar spent. And certain U.S. merchant cohorts see averages as high as $68 per dollar spent, roughly double the cross-industry average.
But here's the part that often gets overlooked: roughly half of companies admit they measure their email ROI poorly or not at all. That's a significant gap between what email can deliver and what most teams are actually capturing.
If your ROI feels underwhelming, the issue probably isn't the channel. It's likely a combination of list quality, deliverability, timing, and how well you're segmenting. Those are solvable problems, and the data in the rest of this piece will show you where to focus.
Open Rates: What the Numbers Actually Mean Now
Open rates used to be the most reliable metric in email marketing. That changed in September 2021 when Apple introduced Mail Privacy Protection (MPP), which pre-loads email content and makes it look like every Apple Mail user opened every email, whether they did or not.
The result is inflated numbers. The average open rate across all industries is reported around 42 to 43% in 2025. At first glance, that looks like improvement over prior years. But when Apple Mail holds roughly 50 to 60% of email client market share, a meaningful chunk of those "opens" are phantom signals generated by Apple's pre-loading behavior, not actual humans reading your email.
This doesn't mean open rates are useless. They still function as a directional indicator, especially for comparing performance across your own campaigns. But relying on them as your primary success metric in 2026 is going to mislead you.
The more telling number is click-to-open rate (CTOR), which has been climbing year over year and sat around 6.8% in 2025. That roughly 21% year-over-year increase suggests that among people who genuinely engage, the content is resonating more effectively. CTOR strips out the noise from MPP and tells you whether your email content is actually compelling enough to drive action.
What does this mean practically? If you're still optimizing campaigns based primarily on open rates, you're optimizing for a signal that's been degraded. Shift your attention to clicks, conversions, and revenue per email. Those metrics reflect actual subscriber behavior, not proxy data distorted by privacy features.
At Robly, this is one of the reasons we built RoblyAI to optimize around engagement patterns rather than open-rate signals alone. The algorithm looks at when individual subscribers are most likely to interact with your emails, not just when they appear to "open" them.
Click-Through Rates and Conversions: Where the Real Story Lives
The average click-through rate (CTR) across all industries sits around 2 to 3.5%, depending on the data source. That might sound modest, but the context matters.
Email click-to-conversion rates grew by roughly 28% in 2024, which means the people who are clicking are increasingly likely to follow through with a purchase or signup. That's a meaningful shift. It suggests that marketers who are segmenting well and sending relevant content are being rewarded with stronger downstream performance.
Industry variations are significant. Books and literature, sports, food and drink, and travel all tend to achieve open rates above 25%. Beauty and cosmetics showed the largest year-over-year improvement in open rates. The games industry posted the highest conversion rate among ecommerce verticals.
The practical takeaway: generic benchmarks are useful for orientation, but they shouldn't dictate your strategy. Your performance relative to your own history and your specific industry matters more than where you stand against an all-industry average.
One thing that consistently moves the needle across every industry is segmentation. Segmented email campaigns generate 30% more opens and 50% more click-throughs, according to HubSpot's 2025 State of Marketing Report. And 78% of marketers say segmentation is their most effective tactic. That tracks with what we see at Robly. When senders use tools like Robly Engage to re-target non-openers with adjusted timing or subject lines, they're essentially applying a form of behavioral segmentation that recovers engagement from subscribers who would otherwise go cold.
Deliverability: The Metric That Determines Everything Else
You can write the perfect email with the perfect subject line, send it to the perfect segment at the perfect time, and none of it matters if the message never reaches the inbox.
Average email deliverability in 2024 was tested at around 83%, which means roughly 17% of emails never reached their intended destination (EmailToolTester). That's nearly one in six messages disappearing before anyone has a chance to read them.
Deliverability also varies dramatically by provider. Gmail averages about 95% deliverability, while AOL sits around 81% (EmailToolTester). Outlook and Office365 have seen some of the steepest declines, with inbox placement dropping significantly for some senders due to strict bulk-sender enforcement.
What's driving these gaps? Mailbox providers are getting more aggressive about filtering based on sender reputation, authentication, and engagement history. Gmail and Yahoo both implemented stricter requirements in 2024 around SPF, DKIM, and DMARC authentication, easy-to-find unsubscribe options, and spam complaint thresholds below 0.3%.
The unsubscribe rate roughly doubled in 2025 compared to the prior year. Part of that increase is attributable to Gmail making the unsubscribe button more prominent, which actually helps senders maintain cleaner lists. A subscriber who unsubscribes is far less damaging to your sender reputation than one who reports you as spam.
For marketers using Robly, deliverability is baked into the platform's infrastructure. But the platform can only do so much if list hygiene is neglected. Regularly removing inactive subscribers, authenticating your sending domain, and monitoring your bounce rates are table-stakes practices that too many senders still skip.
Mobile: The Default Experience Your Subscribers Already Expect
Over half of all email opens now happen on mobile devices. Apple's email client alone holds roughly 50% of all email client market share, followed by Gmail at around 27 to 29% and Outlook at 7 to 8%. According to Forbes, one-third of all emails are opened on an iPhone specifically.
Despite this, nearly one in five email marketing campaigns are still not optimized for mobile (SuperOffice). And 50% of users say they'll delete an email that doesn't render properly on their phone (OptinMonster). That's not a minor friction point. That's half your mobile audience actively penalizing you for a design choice you control.
Responsive email design increases unique mobile clicks by 15% (G2). The math is straightforward: if mobile is where most of your subscribers are reading, designing mobile-first isn't optional. It's the baseline.
This is an area where template quality matters a lot. If you're building emails in Robly's editor, the templates are already responsive. But if you're importing custom HTML, it's worth testing on actual devices, not just the preview pane, to make sure nothing breaks at smaller screen sizes.
Automation: Small Volume, Outsized Returns
Here's the stat that should reshape how you allocate your time: automated emails represent just 2% of total send volume but drive roughly 37% of all email-generated sales. That's not a rounding error. That's a structural advantage for anyone who sets up their automated flows correctly.
Automated messages generate over 300% more revenue than standard campaign sends. Welcome emails alone achieve open rates above 60%. Abandoned cart emails have open rates north of 50%, which is about 15% higher than other marketing emails. And sending three abandoned cart emails results in 69% more orders than sending just one (Oberlo).
Back-in-stock emails have the highest conversion rate of any automated email type, and roughly one in three people who click on an automated message end up making a purchase.
The reason automation works so well is timing and relevance. These emails are triggered by actual subscriber behavior, so they arrive when the subscriber is already engaged with your brand. That's a fundamentally different dynamic than batch-and-blast campaigns, which land whenever you decide to send them.
If you're not running at least a welcome series and an abandoned cart flow, you're leaving the highest-converting email types on the table. In Robly, setting up these automations doesn't require a dedicated email operations team. The platform's automation builder lets you configure trigger-based flows that run continuously without manual intervention.
AI in Email Marketing: Where It Actually Helps
AI adoption in email marketing has passed the 60% mark among marketers, and campaigns powered by AI are driving roughly 41% higher revenue than traditional approaches. By 2026, 89% of marketing experts expect up to 75% of email strategy operations to be AI-driven.
But the application of AI in email isn't uniform, and not all uses are equally valuable. The most impactful applications, according to industry data, are send-time optimization (roughly two-thirds of AI-adopting marketers use it for this), followed by subject line generation, personalization, and audience segmentation.
About 51% of marketers believe AI-powered email marketing is more effective than traditional methods (Statista). And 39% say that AI-driven hyper-personalization will have the biggest impact on email automation going forward.
The key distinction is between AI that generates content and AI that optimizes delivery. Both matter, but they solve different problems. Generative AI can speed up your content creation workflow. Predictive AI, the kind that analyzes subscriber behavior to determine optimal send times or re-engagement triggers, directly impacts your core metrics.
Robly was one of the first email platforms to integrate AI into send-time optimization with RoblyAI, and later expanded into AI-driven content generation with OpenGen. These aren't features layered on as marketing talking points. They're built into the sending logic because the data consistently shows that when and how you reach subscribers matters as much as what you say.
Personalization and Segmentation: The Numbers Back Up What You Already Know
Personalized subject lines generate 50% higher open rates (Oberlo). Personalized calls to action result in 42% higher conversion rates than generic CTAs. And 80% of consumers are more likely to purchase from brands that offer personalized experiences (HubSpot).
Yet only about half of marketers currently personalize their email content, and one-third of marketers admit their email marketing hasn't been integrated with the rest of their marketing program.
The gap between what the data shows works and what most teams actually do is one of the biggest opportunities in email right now. Personalization doesn't have to mean complex dynamic content blocks tied to a customer data platform. It can start with segmentation by purchase behavior, engagement level, or signup source. It can mean adjusting send frequency based on how often a subscriber actually opens your emails.
Robly's list segmentation tools make this approachable. You can segment by engagement recency, geographic data, or custom fields, and then pair those segments with OpenGen to generate subject lines tuned to each group. That's a practical personalization stack that doesn't require a team of data engineers to maintain.
Sending Frequency and Timing: What the Data Suggests
There's no universally perfect send time. But the data points toward some patterns worth testing.
Tuesday and Friday tend to produce the highest open rates, with 35% of respondents naming Tuesday as their preferred day for receiving marketing emails (Statista). Weekends, particularly Sundays, tend to perform worst. The generally recommended times cluster around 8 a.m., 2 p.m., and 5 p.m. (OptinMonster), though these vary significantly by audience.
On frequency, the data says your audience will engage more consistently if you don't overwhelm them. The number one reason people unsubscribe is receiving too many emails (Gartner). Sending two to four emails per week is a reasonable range for most senders, though daily emails can work if your content is consistently valuable.
The real answer, though, is that optimal timing is individual. This is where tools like RoblyAI add genuine value by analyzing each subscriber's engagement patterns and delivering to each person at the time they're most likely to engage. That's more precise than any benchmark study can offer because it's calibrated to your actual audience, not an industry average.
What These Numbers Mean for Your Strategy in 2026
Here's how to think about all of this together.
Email's reach and ROI are not in question. The channel works. What separates high-performing email programs from mediocre ones is execution across a handful of fundamentals: deliverability, segmentation, timing, automation, and mobile optimization.
The data tells a consistent story. Marketers who segment see 30 to 50% better performance. Marketers who automate see over 300% more revenue from 2% of their total sends. Marketers who optimize for mobile capture an audience that penalizes everyone who doesn't. And marketers who use AI for send-time optimization and personalization are seeing 41% higher revenue.
None of these require a massive budget or a dedicated email team. They require the right platform and intentional decisions about how you treat your list and your content.
If you're evaluating where to invest your email marketing energy this year, start with the areas where the data shows the largest performance gaps: automation (most senders still aren't using it effectively), deliverability (nearly one in six emails never arrive), and personalization (less than half of marketers do it well).
Those are the areas where small improvements produce measurable results, and they're exactly the problems Robly was built to solve.
Sources referenced in this article include Statista, HubSpot, Forbes, EmailToolTester, Oberlo, SuperOffice, OptinMonster, Gartner, G2, and Google. All statistics reflect data published in 2024 and 2025.
