With so many options in the marketing tool kit, it’s fair to wonder: Is email marketing still effective? As it turns out, email marketing is still a great option to reach your audience and promote your business. It allows you to send targeted messages directly into the inboxes of potential customers at an affordable price point. Read on to learn how this tactic measures up to other marketing methods.

Email Marketing Stats in 2023

So what does email marketing look like in 2023? Here’s a roundup of some key performance metrics that paint of picture of email marketing’s effectiveness today.

ROI of Email Marketing

An important aspect of measuring email’s viability is its cost-effectiveness. According to digital marketing firm Smart Insights, email marketing’s ROI surpasses many marketing modalities. More than 80% of marketers are spending as much as 20% of their marketing budgets on email.

According to Statista, the average ROI of email marketing is $36 for every $1 spent. Some industries surpassed this average, such as retail, ecommerce and consumer goods, which tend to see a $45 return for every dollar. Compare this to the ROI of some other marketing methods:

• $5.97 per $1 spent for out-of-home advertising
• $2 per $1 spent for pay-per-click ads, such as Google ads
• $5.78 per $1 spent for influencer marketing

The average ROI of email marketing is $36 for every $1 spent.

Email Open Rates

One of the most important metrics to measure when evaluating email marketing success is open rates. Before an email can generate any revenue for your business, it has to make it past the first hurdle: the trash bin. Even the most interesting subject line may not entice every recipient to open your email. The key is to understand your benchmarks and aim to meet or exceed them. Open rates vary by industry and even type of email (for example, promotional emails vs. transactional emails). Enterprise email tools, such as Mailchimp or Constant Contact, publish open rate benchmarks to measure your program against.

Across industries, Mailchimp finds the average email open rate is 21.33%. This means that if you send your email to 100 people, you can expect about 21 of them to open it and the other 79 to ignore or delete it without ever opening. Although it’s important to have relatively high open rates, they’re only half the battle of the inbox. For truly effective emails, you’ll also need high click rates.

Across industries, the average email open rate is 21.33%.

Click Rates

Click rate refers to the percentage of people who clicked on at least one link in your email. This number represents a subset of the people who opened the email, so it will be lower than the open rate. Click rates indicate the success of your emails at driving traffic—whether it be to a product page, appointment scheduler, registration page or even your blog. Click rates, like open rates, vary by industry. According to Constant Contact, the average click rate across industries is 1.33%. This means that if your email was successfully delivered to 100 people, you can expect less than 2 of them to click on a link within it.

By understanding and optimizing these metrics, you can improve the effectiveness of your email marketing campaigns and measure their success.

5 Ways to Improve Email Marketing Success

Here are five ways you can improve your email performance right now.

1. Personalize emails using merge tags. By making customers feel like they’re being addressed directly in the subject line and/or in the body of your email can increase engagement.
2. Use segmentation tools to target specific demographics and tailor content accordingly. By analyzing demographics, psychographics and lifestyle data you can target your messages more effectively.
3. Include a call-to-action in your emails. This helps to drive people to take the desired action, whether it’s visiting your website, signing up for a newsletter, or making a purchase.
4. Run some A/B tests. There are many variables that influence email marketing performance. Testing these variables regularly and replicating successes is a good way to continually optimize your email marketing program:
   • Subject lines
   • Sender name
   • Send time (include day of the week and time of day)
   • Email content (including CTAs and colors)
5. Optimize for mobile devices. Many people check their emails on their phones, so make sure your emails are optimized for smaller screens. This will help ensure that your audience can view all the images and text in the email without having to zoom in or scroll around.

The Verdict: Is Email Marketing Still Effective?

The short answer is: Yes. Email marketing is one of the highest-performing marketing tactics in terms of ROI. While it may seem that inboxes are more crowded than ever, this cost-effective method should complement a well-rounded marketing mix for optimal results.