The Truth!
Email Is the Most Essential Tool in a Digital Strategy

Email marketing was once the cornerstone of a robust digital marketing strategy. As social media and other platforms have grown in leaps and bounds, email is seen by some as a staid holdover of the early internet days. Are there still benefits to email marketing? The answer is yes. Email remains a powerful tool for reaching customers and building loyalty. The COVID-19 pandemic further influenced email use as more marketers used email compared to pre-pandemic levels.

Successful marketers focus their efforts and budgets on what works, and email continues to justify its place as an ROI champion. Here are a few email marketing statistics showing how effective email marketing can be.

Email Marketing Statistics for 2022

• 64% of small businesses use email marketing to reach customers. (Campaign Monitor)
• There are 4 billion daily email users. Email users are expected to climb to 4.6 billion by 2025. (Statista)
• More than 306 billion emails are sent and received each day. (Statista)
• The global email marketing market was valued at $7.5 billion in 2020 and is projected to increase to $17.9 billion by 2027. (Statista)
• 78% of marketers have seen an increase in email engagement over the last 12 months. (Hubspot)
• 4 out of 5 marketers said they’d rather give up social media than email marketing. (Litmus, 2020)

Imagine a horror movie called “How Many Emails Do I Have?” This probably sounds all too familiar to anyone who has gone a few days without checking their email account, but what if it was the only account in the world? You would wake up in the morning and find 293.6 billion messages, the total number of emails sent per day.

The death of email as a communication tool has been dramatically overstated. Our communication platforms and preferences have indeed fragmented, but this has more to do with the ways people communicate. For example, people may use messenger apps to communicate with family and friends as they used email 20 years ago. Still, new email accounts continue to grow. There were 4 billion email users worldwide as of 2020. The figure is over half of the world’s population and shows no slowing down. Growth is forecast at a steady 3% annual rate, with the number of email users predicted to reach close to 4.5 billion in 2024.

Number of Email Users in the World

Benefits of Email Marketing

The value of email marketing over social media and other platforms is that people on an email list have chosen to be there. Customers like to get emails, particularly affluent customers. According to a study by MarketingSherpa, 96% of people earn $75,000-$99,900 annually, and 92% of people who make at least $100,000 per year want promotional emails from companies they are already doing business with. Furthermore, more than 60% of consumers say they want weekly promotional emails, and 38% say they want them even more often. In addition, emails tailored to customers based on shared data drive engagement. Emails tailored to customers based on shared data drive engagement.

US Email Marketing Benchmarks

That all sounds good, but what about email marketing ROI? According to the Campaign Monitor Email Benchmarking report, open email rates in 2021 remained strong at 17.6%, with a click-through rate holding steady at 2.6%. It is important to note that the open rate is more important than the click-through rate for some types of emails and industries. This beats other marketing formats several times over, including social media and paid search. For every $1 you spend on email marketing, you can expect an average return of $42.

Email marketing remains perhaps the most essential tool in a digital strategy for most businesses. The key to meeting the email marketing benchmarks in 2022 is understanding customer preferences and revising email strategies to reflect those preferences and how customers use email today.

Notes: Article updated March 15, 2022

Filed under: Email Marketing, Marketing Library