2023 email statistics to know if you’re in the creator economy

If you practice a comprehensive digital marketing strategy, email marketing likely makes up a significant portion of it. Yet it can be tough for any modern brand to know when it’s spending the right amount of money on email ads, retargeting content, and other email marketing materials. Let’s break down some of the most important email marketing stats of 2023. You can use these steps to shape your future email marketing strategy.

Email marketing revenue will reach $11 billion by 2023

According to Statista, the total revenue brought about by email marketing should reach almost $11 billion by the end of 2023. This prediction is two years old, but it’s still on track to be accurate.

Importantly, this indicates that email marketing has a major role to play in business revenue and advertising success, even if (as some of the statistics below will indicate) it’s less of a role than it was previously.

Daily email use will reach 4.6 billion by 2025

Perhaps expectedly, right now, there are approximately 4 billion daily email users. But that number should increase to 4.6 billion by 2025. Statista indicates, in short, that email users around the world are increasing.

That’s a good thing for brands that still use email marketing, as it means more eyeballs looking at your email marketing materials. But it also means that you’ll need to differentiate your email campaigns from those of your competitors.

Most brands are increasing email marketing budgets

Most brands know the above information. Because of this, most brands are also increasing their email marketing budgets to some extent. According to Litmus, 37% of brands in total are increasing their email marketing budgets. Meanwhile, 1.3% are making cuts.

It’s ultimately up to you which path your business decides to take. But if most of your competitors are doubling down on email marketing, it might be a good idea to do the same, even if it means taking some marketing money from other potential avenues.

Most small businesses use email marketing

The above statistic correlates with Campaign Monitor’s finding that 64% of small businesses use email marketing to reach their customers. In other words, most small businesses across industries use email marketing heavily to attract leads and draw new clients to their brands.

This is a surefire sign that your business should be doing the same thing if it isn’t already. Email marketing can be a highly effective tool to get new customers and to keep current customers or clients purchasing or subscribing again and again.

Fewer brands say email marketing is critical

Even with the above statistics, it’s also true that fewer brands now say that their email marketing is “very critical” to their overall business success. Litmus found this in 2021 and noted that it was a significant difference from the 78% that said email marketing was very critical in 2020.

This could represent a shift in how brands think of email marketing. Many businesses might now think of email marketing as a supplementary advertising element meant to work in conjunction with things like social media marketing or other forms of advertising.

For example, those brands might use different forms of digital advertising, like content marketing through blogs or affiliate marketing deals or traditional Google or Amazon PPC ads, which have historically proven successful at increasing brand awareness and profits.

Depending on what your metrics say about your email marketing performance, you may also decide to pivot some of your resources to other marketing avenues.

Yet email engagement continues to rise

But don’t scrap your email marketing budget just yet. Recent studies have shown that 77% of marketers saw an increase in email engagement throughout 2021, and this trend has increased up to the midpoint of 2023. Paradoxically, even though many brands don’t think of email marketing as absolutely critical to their success, email marketing is more engaging to consumers than ever before.

The cause of this could be multi-fold. For example, engagement doesn’t necessarily increase revenue, as a marketing email has to include a link to a product or service for it to directly result in a conversion. But email engagement could still see increased conversion in terms of:

• Brand awareness
• Client loyalty
• Cart reminders
• And more

The best email subject lines are multi-faceted

Most brands that leverage email marketing already know that subject lines are highly important. A bad subject line will usually result in a low open rate. Recent research indicates that the most effective email subject lines:

• Engage curiosity
• Include interesting promotional offers
• Are personalized to recipient interests

This is highly valuable information if you want to include your emails’ open rates in the future.

Email marketing testing yields excellent results

Meanwhile, you should also make heavy use of email marketing testing, including A/B testing, spam testing, and QA testing. Litmus found that brands that used these different testing strategies had a 28% higher return on their investments compared to brands that did not. Test your emails to make sure they are effective before sending them out en masse.

AI could revamp your email marketing strategy

Many studies indicate that artificial intelligence and machine learning could significantly impact email marketing strategies and procedures going forward.

According to HubSpot, 95% of marketers that use generative AI for email creation say that it is effective. 54% say it’s very effective. If your brand isn’t already using AI, you might consider it in the future.

Email marketing is especially important for B2B marketing

If your brand is a B2B or business-to-business company, you need to know that email marketing could be especially important for your advertising strategy. About 81% of B2B marketers say that the most used form of content marketing is email newsletters.

This makes sense to an extent, as email marketing allows you to showcase your brand’s expertise or focus in its industry.

Nearly 16% of emails are missing or caught in spam folders

It’s more important than ever to make sure your emails don’t trigger any spam folders and are targeted precisely for their intended recipients. That’s because about 15.8% of all emails go missing or are caught by spam filters, resulting in wasted advertising effort and money.

Most email views come from mobile

If your email marketing isn’t tailored to mobile users, it should be. That’s because the majority of all email views come from mobile devices, at 41%. Desktop views only comprise 39% of all email views.

Given this fact, you should do what you can to make sure your marketing emails are:

• Easily viewable on mobile devices
• Navigable on mobile devices
• Load quickly on mobile devices, meaning they don’t have excessive graphics or sounds
• And more

All of these steps combined will make your emails more accessible to mobile users and target audience members.

All of the takeaways

As you can see, email marketing is still highly important. Yet at the same time, it’s crucial to design and send your emails to the right people at the right time. The most successful companies use their marketing budgets wisely, leveraging email marketing as a targeted tool instead of a mass advertising method. Keep this in mind when developing your next email marketing strategy to see excellent results.