email-marketing-roi-statistics-you-must-know
16 December 2024

Email marketing ROI statistics you must know: Key eCommerce insights for 2025

Create exceptional emails
Table of contents
  1. Top 10 email marketing ROI statistics every eCommerce marketer should know
  2. How much ROI is needed for email marketing to succeed in eCommerce?
  3. Detailed analysis of key statistics
  4. ROI-driven insights on types of emails for eCommerce
  5. Wrapping up
1.
Top 10 email marketing ROI statistics every eCommerce marketer should know

In this article, we will explore key email marketing ROI statistics for eCommerce in 2024. You will gain insights into trends, strategies, and metrics that can help optimize your eCommerce email campaigns and drive better results and revenue.

Over half of the entire planet’s population uses email daily for communication, networking, signing up for social media — you name it. This has created a huge market that surpasses even social media in its professional reach and personal impact. Email marketing holds up as the ultimate way to leverage this omnipresence, making for a powerful marketing tool boasting outreach, influence, and, most importantly, demand. 

For some readers, the effects of making email marketing efforts today may not be convincing. However, the statistics in this article demonstrate exactly why email marketing is nearly the most effective marketing channel.

Top 10 email marketing ROI statistics every eCommerce marketer should know

  • 4.5 billion people worldwide and over 82% of the US population use email regularly;
  • the total number of people using email is growing steadily by over 100 million users each year; 
  • more than 347 billion emails were sent in 2023 alone, with the number projected to grow annually; 
  • in 2024, global email marketing revenue is hitting a $12.3+ billion mark;
  • average email marketing ROI remains outstandingly high, especially in eCommerce and retail, where it reaches 45.1%;
  • in 2022–2023, email unsubscribe rates rose 0.08% to 0.11%, while spam spiked slightly, 0.00% to 0.01%, indicating the need for brands to update their email marketing efforts;
  • automated emails boost email sends by 99.2% and email open rates by 91.5% and make up 46.9% of all purchase-followed email clicks;
  • today, about 56% of all emails are clicked and opened via mobile devices;
  • 75% of consumers prefer customized emails, with personalized subject lines boosting email open rates by up to 20–29%;
  • 46% of brands admit that the main challenge of adopting email marketing today is the inability to find and leverage a fitting marketing tool or service.

Number of email users worldwide

(Source: Statista)

How much ROI is needed for email marketing to succeed in eCommerce?

Your average ROI is shaped by your open rate (OR), click-through rate (CTR), click-to-open rate (CTOR), and unsubscribe, spam complaint, and bounce rates. To give you a fuller picture for comparison, here are the relevant bottom-line averages for each metric:

  • average email OR: 39.64%;
  • average email CTR: 3.25%;
  • average email CTOR: 8.62%;
  • average email unsubscribe rate: 0.15%;
  • average email spam complaint rate: less than 0.01%;
  • average email bounce rate: 2.33%.

Detailed analysis of key statistics

The above email marketing statistics summarize a bigger picture that we invite you to explore. Let’s take a closer look at each stat.

Massive audience

There are currently 4.48 billion email users in the world, each opening their inboxes, checking their spam folders, or starting new messages for their own purposes. This makes up the largest available base of potential receivers for your promo offers — over half of the world’s population.

For comparison, today’s social media user audience amounts to about 5.2 billion people, but not all of their accounts are active and reachable. And yes, at 82%, a majority of the US population has email accounts as well.

Ever-growing demand

In 2023, 281.4 million people living in the US actively checked their emails, a number that is projected to grow to 290.1 million by 2027. On a global scale, every year, 100+ million more people create new email accounts; the total user base jumped from 4.37 billion in 2023 to 4.48 billion in 2024.

In response to this demand, the vast majority of marketers leverage email engagement in various technologically and data-driven ways, with 87% of the surveyed providers planning to maintain or boost their investment in promotional emails.

The trend for email engagement persists, driving high ROI and gaining impressive momentum. To give you an example of how the overall efficiency of email campaigns grows in just over a year, here’s how average KPIs changed from 2022 to 2023:

US email marketing benchmarks

(Source: Emarketer)

  • average ORs: 2022 – 30.7% to 2023 – 45.6%;
  • average CTORs: 2022 – 8.7% to 2023 – 9.5%;
  • average CTRs: 2022 – 2.7% to 2023 – 4.3%.

Email marketing ROI

38% of the surveyed marketers (out of over 2,000) said that the measure of their email marketing’s return on investment will remain the most important and effective metric when tracking their emails’ performance in 2025.

At the same time, other email ROI statistics indicate that 75% of budget-minded businesses that invest $100 or less each month in email marketing gain an ROI of $21 for every dollar invested. In turn, 51% of businesses investing up to $500 in personalized email marketing campaigns get up to $31 back per dollar invested.

These readings fluctuate from field to field, with eCommerce players getting an even better average ROI of up to $45 per dollar. The email market ROI ratio by industry is as follows:

ROI by industry _ Litmus

(Source: Litmus)

  • media and entertainment: $32:$1;
  • software and technology: $36:$1;
  • marketing and advertising: $42:$1;
  • eCommerce and consumer retail: $45:$1.

You can start maximizing and expanding these ROI readings using a variety of proven methods

Email marketing revenue

Email still outruns social media in terms of marketing efficiency and profitability. Shooting from $10.8 billion in 2023 to $12.3 this year (2024), the figures for email marketing revenue worldwide are projected to grow at a steady pace of $1–2 billion each year.

Email marketing revenue worldwide

(Source: Statista)

As you can see from the graph, the numbers only go up from here. Email will thrive as the #1 online reference tool, remaining the most popular marketing platform for widespread promotion, marketing, and PR. 

Number of emails sent

With over 360 billion emails already sent this year (2024) — a 10-billion jump from 2023 — we are looking at projected daily traffic of 408 billion emails to be sent annually by 2027. This includes both business and consumer emails sent per day. Their numbers grow every year, along with the number of email users, at a steady 4–4.1%. 

Reasons for unsubscribing

The global email newsletter unsubscribe rate grew (albeit slightly) from 0.08% to 0.11% in 2022–2023, while people also started flagging 0.1% more email messages as spam (from 0.00% in 2022 to 0.01% in 2023). More consumers started unsubscribing from brand newsletters and company emails, especially in the USA.

Reportedly, 40% of US consumers unsubscribe from promotions, website updates, and blogs every week — compared to the global average of 25% of regular “unsubscribers.” 36% of these confess to unsubscribing purely because they do not even remember signing up for this or that promo in the first place.

Even more related email marketing stats state that 50% of all US consumers get tired of receiving daily messages from the same brand, deciding to drop the subscription in 30 days or sooner.

Automated emails

As seen from the above marketing stats, the most email-active consumers are getting flustered and frustrated by constant soulless promo-focused emails. Automation is one of the approaches to help pour more soul into such emails without going too far or going broke.

In particular, an automated email newsletter has been proven to boost your marketing’s conversion rates by 16.8% year over year. But there’s more — the stats indicate that about 40% of all people clicking on automated emails follow through to make purchases or service orders.

To let the figures speak for themselves, here’s how automation boosts email marketing performance across the main metrics:

  • OR — 91.5% boost;
  • click rate — 329.5% boost;
  • conversion rate — 3210% boost.

Mobile-first is the answer

To keep an email audience less overwhelmed by all the promo correspondence and make them feel more easily involved, email marketers should prioritize the mobile-first approach. On average, about 56% of all emails are viewed via mobile devices (27% via webmail and only 17% via desktop apps).

On top of that, real-time push notifications, which enjoy the biggest success on mobile, brought some brands a 59% CTR, driving a profitable omnichannel experience. 

Personalization is a must

The last but the most important touch to help capture consumers’ hearts is good personalization. 75% of consumers prefer to see personalized content in the offers they click on, expecting a certain level of customization. As a result, well-personalized emails get 29% more unique opens, 41% more unique clicks, 14% more unique click-throughs, and 10% higher conversion rates, as opposed to standard, globalized newsletters.

eCommerce email personalization

(Source: Email.uplers)

A strong, impactful keyword-based subject line that incentivizes consumers individually (e.g., one pointing out free delivery for remote consumers) alone can be responsible for a 35% OR and 81% click rate boost. 

Getting the right tools

Once you know which metrics to set your sights on and which methods to double down on (automation, mobile first, and personalization), all you need is the right tool to organize, customize, and manage marketing emails. A proper tool will help automate all of these processes while allowing you to calculate the approximate profitability of your efforts. 

ROI-driven insights on types of emails for eCommerce

In addition to all the above, it’s important to understand the extent of the impact and efficiency you can achieve with concrete types of emails.

Welcome emails

Welcome emails are among the most baseline engaging types, reaching stats like

  • 91% OR;
  • 86% unique opens boost;
  • 196% unique clicks boost;
  • 26.9% CTR;
  • 42% higher read rates.

Abandoned cart emails

Abandoned cart emails work as a great way to remind consumers and reignite their purchasing intention, demonstrating:

  • 49%+ OR;
  • 21% CTR;
  • 18.6% conversion rate;
  • up to 65% of consumers tend to abandon carts.

Post-purchase emails

Another good tool to stimulate more new purchases, which can help you drive:

  • 40.5% OR;
  • 6.4% CTR;
  • 0.7% conversion rate;
  • return customers tend to spend 31% more money than new customers.

Transactional emails

In addition to guiding the completion of the purchase process, order and shipping confirmation emails serve as small yet efficient email marketing stat-boosters, boasting:

  • 9.9% (order confirmation) and 20.8% (shipping confirmation) click rate;
  • 1.9% and 1.3% conversion rates (respectively);
  • 19.9% and 6.5 click-to-conversion (respectively).

Promotional emails

Promotional emails make up the bulk of the usual email marketing newsletters that we are discussing here, with their stats summarized as follows:

  • 46–50% OR;
  • 2.6–3% CTR;
  • 7–9% click rate;
  • 45%+ ROI;
  • 85%+ email delivery rate;
  • up to a 55% conversion rate.

Survey/feedback emails

Emails containing themed surveys or feedback forms boast the following statistics:

  • survey/feedback emails make up 8% of all types of emails used during an email marketing campaign;
  • forms, the most popular type of email widget, were used in 581 million emails;
  • open-ended, dynamic content generates ROI up to $42:$1.

Wrapping up

Achieving email marketing efficiency is all about one’s approach to leveraging email technology the right way, minding the right metrics, and aiming for well-proven results.

Here are some more interesting stats for you — 70% of brands still fail to personalize their subscriber-bound emails, with only about 39% of retailers putting in work to customize offers and recommendations that they email. Turn things around by leveraging technology and focusing more on the people who receive promotional emails from your brand.

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