7 Mind Blowing E-commerce Email Marketing Stats [2024 Update]

By Liza Shuttleworth Last updated: 02.16.2024 8 minute read Marketing Guides

Online retail is getting increasingly difficult every year, no question about it.

You don’t need to be an experienced e-commerce professional to figure out how hard it is to find your place under the online sun and outperform hundreds of competitors in your niche.

According to rough estimations, more than 20 million e-commerce websites are currently active on the Internet.

That’s a very serious figure that must feel terrifying to both beginner-level entrepreneurs and business professionals with years of experience in digital retail.

But there is a way to solve the e-commerce riddle and build a profitable company.

Although many brands focus on social media as the primary means of business communication, it turns out the email campaigns are still the most powerful marketing concept in 2024.

The strategy offers you a variety of practical advantages that can help you drive sales in the long run.

In this post, we will explain the basic features of e-commerce email marketing and point out stats and facts that make it so incredibly useful for online retailers.

Let’s take a look!

4 Reasons Why Email Marketing Matters

Before we highlight the stats that empirically prove the significance of email marketing, we want to discuss why this marketing strategy really means a lot to e-commerce companies.

Here are the benefits of running email campaigns:

Highly targeted audience: Email users subscribe to your newsletters intentionally, which means they really want to engage with your content. This type of audience is highly targeted and consists of verified leads only.
Deliver personalized messages: Jake Gardner, a digital marketer says emailing platforms make it easy to deliver personalized messages based on the preferences of each subscriber individually: “Instead of creating depersonalized content, you can tailor a message in a way that suits a specific customer.”
Simplicity: Email marketing is very simple, globally accessible, and easy to execute. It is impossible to find a simpler but more effective business communication channel.
Data analytics: Modern email marketing platforms come with comprehensive analytics tools and enable administrators to identify the pros and cons of their campaigns in real-time.

Email marketing stats — Part of an infographic by invesp

7 Stats That Reveal the Impact of Emails on E-commerce

You can find hundreds of email marketing reports online, but we selected only a few stats that reveal the impact of these campaigns on e-commerce.

Without further ado, let’s check them out, one by one:

1. Nearly 50% of the World’s Population Uses Email

A report shows that there were more than three billion email users around the world in 2020, which makes almost half of the global population.

At the same time, 72% of consumers say email is the main resource of business communication.

What does it tell you?

First of all, email marketing enables you to approach global audiences. No matter where you come from, you can reach out and promote products or services to users on the other side of the world.

Secondly, email is widely considered to be the official means of business communication.

That’s why it’s important to use a business email for your communication because it will represent your business and it will look more professional rather than sending the email from a personalized one.

Although there are so many ways to communicate in the digital universe – including live chat software and social messaging – email remains the number one pick for the vast majority of customers.

In other words, email should be the main choice for e-commerce businesses.

2. Welcome Emails Skyrocket User Engagement By Up to 500%

Do you know that welcome emails generate four times more opens and five times more clicks than regular email marketing messages? It is a huge reminder for e-commerce businesses that they absolutely have to send welcome emails to the new subscribers.

The secret behind such productivity of welcome emails is simple – a new subscriber still has your business in mind and wants to keep interacting with your content.

This gives you the chance to take action and introduce your business to the subscriber. You can do it in the following way:

Send a “Thank You” message
Set expectations in terms of mailing frequency
Briefly explain the nature of your email content
Deliver the first perk (free eBook, coupon, etc.)
Add links to social accounts

As soon as you break the ice with the welcome email, it will be easier to keep interacting with subscribers and sending them fresh business-related information.

Ecommerce email marketing examples — Image credit: Sleeknote

3. Subject Lines Convince 50% of Users to Open Emails

According to the survey, nearly 50% of email recipients open emails based on the subject line alone. This is not a surprise given the fact that people often form opinions based on first impressions.

In such circumstances, the only thing you need to do is to impress the audience with informative, funny, or unusual subject lines.

Although it sounds simple, it takes a lot of copywriting skills to craft a perfect headline every time.

It mostly depends on your inspiration and creativity, but we can give you several suggestions:

Keep the subject line short and allow users to read the entire line of text
Make it straightforward, clear, and concise
Use numbers, questions, or humor to evoke curiosity
Place the most important keywords at the beginning
Create a sense of urgency and importance

You can test other tricks as well, but these proved to be highly productive for email senders in all fields of work.

4. Personalized Emails Have a Much Higher Open Rate

Studies reveal that personalized emails have an average open rate of 18.8% or 5.7% higher than non-personalized email messages.

The days of generic content are long gone, so you’ll have to start designing tailored emails that match the needs and expectations of a given subscriber.

Addressing recipients by their names is a well-known tactic, but you can go beyond that and use a variety of other tricks to impress the targeted customer.

For instance, you can open the message with a question and ask a given user about his/her content preferences and experiences on your business website. It will prove that you already understand their habits and earn you additional customer-related information.

email marketing statistics: information used for personalization — Image credit: Salecycle.com

5. The Timing Makes the Difference Between Top-performers and Underachievers

Perhaps it seems irrelevant, but you’ll have a better chance of earning someone’s attention if you think about the timing of your message.

The best day of the week to send a marketing email is Tuesday, while the best time of day to send an email is 10 am.

This stat is the result of multiple analyses, but we encourage you to dig deeper and analyze the preferences of your target audience.

It’s a critical step because you might discover that your subscribers are mostly active online during weekends or in the evening.

After all, you cannot expect everyone to behave the same – young people, middle-aged persons, business professionals, and older individuals all behave differently, so you’ll need to figure out the emailing habits of your subscriber group in particular.

6. Abandoned Cart Emails Have a 40% Open Rate

Do you know that the overall average open rate for basket abandonment emails is 40%, with a click-through rate of almost 29%? Retargeting is one of the easiest ways to fix the abandoned cart problem and turn hesitating subscribers into full-time customers.

Most marketers will use the following strategy:

Remind subscribers about the items left in their shopping baskets
Point out only one product that matters the most to the business
Offer a discount

The tactic doesn’t work 100% of the time, but it will certainly convince a lot of prospects to come back and complete the purchase.

After all, generating 5% or 10% of additional conversions will mean a lot to your company from a long-term perspective.

7. Email Marketing ROI is 3900%

We saved the best for last as a typical email marketing campaign generates $40 for every dollar invested. It’s a staggering stat that turns even the most suspicious e-commerce businesses into passionate email marketing practitioners.

Image: Orbelo

If you are still wondering whether to spend time and money on email marketing, this fact should help you make a decision and start thinking about how to improve your email marketing plan.

7 E-commerce Email Marketing Tactics That Work Like a Charm by Neil Patel

The Bottom Line

Email marketing is one of the most efficient weapons in the arsenal of e-commerce companies because it allows them to approach highly targeted and verified leads. It’s a value-rich channel of business communication and you have to take advantage of it in order to grow your online retail store.

In this article, we analyzed the benefits of email marketing in e-commerce and showed you the key stats and facts about this marketing strategy. We hope these statements convinced you to spend more time planning email campaigns because it could help you skyrocket sales sooner than you think!

Frequently Asked Questions

What is email marketing?

Email marketing is a modern digital marketing strategy that involves sending emails to prospects and developing relationships with customers both pre and post-purchase. More on email marketing in the complete article.

How to develop email marketing strategies?

You can create an effective email marketing strategy in a few steps. Choose Your Email Marketing Tools. Identify your target audience and create Your email list segments. Create email content and schedule campaigns. More on email marketing in the complete article.

Is email marketing effective?

Nearly 50% of the world's population uses email so you can get to almost all kinds of audiences through this channel. Read more on email marketing in the complete article.

AUTHOR BIO: Leon Collier works for the best dissertation writing services and is the first person I talk to when I need to write my research paper. Leon enjoys writing about various topics such as pop culture, travel, self-development, and digital marketing. He enjoys reading and playing tabletop games on Saturdays with his friends.