Email Marketing Statistics for 2026: Usage, Benchmarks, Deliverability and the ROI Claims

Fifteen email figures, each with its publisher and its year

Every figure here was checked on the publisher's own page in October 2026. Where a figure is older than 2024, the table says so and the text explains why we kept it. Open rate benchmarks get only a line here because our guide to email open rates covers them in full. This page belongs to our marketing statistics library.

Who still has an inbox: almost everyone who is online

The best public measure of email use in the United States is not a vendor survey. It is the NTIA Internet Use Survey, which the Commerce Department's telecommunications agency runs as a supplement to the Census Bureau's Current Population Survey. In November 2023, 92.4% of internet users age 15 and older said they used email, about 213.5 million people. The survey runs every two years, and 2023 is the latest edition in NTIA's public dataset.

• By age: 93.1% of internet users 15 to 24, 95.0% of those 25 to 44, 93.0% of those 45 to 64 and 86.5% of those 65 and older used email in 2023.
• Over time: the same measure was 83.7% in July 2013 and 90.9% in July 2015, and it has stayed above 90% in every edition since.
• What it does not say: how often people check, or whether they read marketing mail. Use is not attention.

Where people read is a different question, and the answer is Apple, sort of. Litmus counted more than 1.5 billion opens in September 2026 and attributed 76.56% to Apple's mail apps, 16.10% to Gmail and 3.48% to desktop Outlook. Litmus itself says Apple's privacy feature now affects roughly 55% to 60% of all opens and that those opens are not considered reliable. The Apple share measures image downloads by Apple's servers as much as it measures human beings holding iPhones.

Provider benchmarks disagree, and each one is honest about its own customers

Every email platform publishes benchmarks drawn from its own customer base. They are real data and they are not the same data. Omnisend reports a 30.7% average open rate for 2025 across 150,000 e-commerce brands. MailerLite reports a 43.46% median for December 2024 to November 2025 across 181,000 accounts. Klaviyo's 2026 page calls 31% a good campaign open rate, which is a target, not an average. None of these can be compared directly, because the customers, the math and the Apple filtering differ.

Omnisend's 2025 data adds one figure open rates cannot fake: click-to-conversion rose from 5.9% to 9%, meaning more of the people who clicked went on to buy. For a store, that is closer to the number that pays the rent. The e-commerce marketing guide covers how email fits beside search and ads.

Automation earns more per message, according to the companies that sell automation

The clearest pattern in the 2025 and 2026 vendor data is the gap between automated messages (welcome series, abandoned cart, browse and post-purchase emails) and scheduled campaigns. Two large e-commerce platforms measured it on different customers and reached the same direction.

Two cautions keep these honest. First, both companies sell the automation tools they are measuring, and neither study is a controlled experiment: an abandoned-cart email goes to someone who was already at the register. Second, per-send figures compare messages, not programs. The newsletter still builds the list that the automations later harvest. Our guide to marketing automation explains which flows a small business should build first, and the small business email guide puts them in order.

An abandoned-cart email outperforms a newsletter for the same reason a cashier outsells a billboard.

One in six marketing emails never reaches the inbox

Validity, which sells deliverability tools, put the global inbox placement rate at 83.5% in 2024 in its 2025 deliverability benchmark, which it summarizes as one in six marketing emails missing the inbox. By mailbox provider, Gmail placed 87.2% in the inbox, Yahoo 86%, Apple 76% and Microsoft 75.6%. Spam folder placement ran 14.6% at Microsoft and 14.3% at Apple, against 6.8% at Gmail. Validity's public page does not describe its sample or method, so read the figures as one vendor's dataset.

The mailbox providers have also written down rules, and these are not averages. They are thresholds with consequences.

• Gmail's spam rate limits: keep spam rates in Postmaster Tools below 0.10% and never reach 0.30%, per Google's sender guidelines.
• Gmail's bulk sender rules: since February 1, 2024, anyone sending more than 5,000 messages a day to Gmail accounts must set up SPF, DKIM and DMARC and support one-click unsubscribe in marketing messages.
• CAN-SPAM: the FTC says each separate violating email can bring a penalty of up to $53,088, and opt-out requests must be honored within 10 business days.
• Your own records: a website move that drops SPF or DKIM records can cut inbox placement overnight, as our page on email that stopped working after a site move explains.

The list hygiene guide covers bounces, sunset policies and testing, and the list building guide explains why bought lists wreck the numbers above.

Where the $36 email ROI figure comes from, as far as anyone can tell

"Email returns $36 for every $1 spent" may be the most repeated number in marketing. Litmus, an email testing company, states it on its own website today, with no study, date or method beside it. Its older published research is easier to examine: a 2018 Litmus release reported returns of 38 times what brands invest, based on data from nearly 400 marketers worldwide. The same release said 70% of brands admit they cannot measure their email ROI well.

Read that pair together. A ratio reported by marketers, most of whom say they cannot measure it, is a mood, not a measurement. Litmus's own research went further and argued that very high ROI signals under-investment, recommending brands spend enough to bring it closer to 20 to 1. That 20 to 1 is advice, not a finding.

Omnisend's 2026 report offers a newer version: $79 per $1 spent across email, SMS and push, and $76 for email alone. Its footnote says this comes from an internal analysis of revenue attributed to messages from merchants on paid plans in 2025. Attributed revenue includes buyers who might have bought anyway, and the footnote does not say what counts as the dollar spent, or whether staff time is in it.

How to read these numbers before one lands in a budget meeting

1. 1

   Ask who sold what

   Klaviyo and Omnisend sell automation, Validity sells deliverability help, Litmus sells email testing and analytics. Their data can be excellent. It is rarely bad news for their own product.

2. 2

   Ask whose customers were counted

   Platform benchmarks describe that platform's users. A store-heavy base and a newsletter-heavy base produce different averages from identical human behavior.

3. 3

   Ask whether opens were cleaned

   Any open-based figure since Apple's 2021 change counts some machine downloads. Prefer clicks, orders and revenue per recipient.

4. 4

   Ask whether it was measured or reported

   The NTIA figures come from a large household survey. The Litmus ROI ratio came from marketers describing their own results. Both are surveys; only one has a government statistician behind it.

5. 5

   Ask how old it is

   The 2018 ROI study predates Apple's privacy feature and Gmail's 2024 sender rules. We keep it because it is the most transparent published source for the famous ratio, not because it describes 2026.

Building a benchmark from your own sends

The only email statistic that describes your business is your own. Tag every link with utm_medium=email so GA4 can tie orders and leads to each send, set up conversion tracking for calls and forms, then track four numbers monthly: click rate, unsubscribe rate, spam complaints and revenue or leads per thousand emails delivered. Compare each send with your last twelve, not with a platform's industry table.

If the numbers point to a delivery or setup problem, the newsletter guide and the rest of the email marketing guide cover the fixes. If you would rather hand the list, the automations and the reporting to someone else, DataCram's email marketing service reports in clicks, replies and sales. For the wider numbers on small business budgets, see small business statistics and digital marketing statistics.