61 Email Marketing Statistics for Ecommerce (2026)

Email marketing is the practice of sending commercial messages to email subscribers to promote products, share updates, and build customer relationships. It provides ecommerce brands a direct line of communication with their customers.

According to Omnisend’s 2026 ecommerce marketing report, automated emails made up just 2% of emails sent in 2025 but drove 30% of email-driven revenue for the platform’s users.

This guide rounds up key email marketing statistics ecommerce for store owners, including usage trends, budget benchmarks, industry open rates and click-through rates. It also has key stats on return on investment (ROI), mobile behavior, subject line data, personalization, automation, and AI adoption. 

A note on sources and methodology: Statistics in this article come from primary research firms, email service providers reporting on their own send data, and industry surveys.

Email usage statistics

For ecommerce store owners building an audience of email subscribers, the size and check-frequency numbers below frame what’s possible:

• The global pool of email users reached 4.55 billion in 2025 and is projected to grow to 4.97 billion by 2028, according to Statista.
• The majority of email users (93%) check their inbox daily, with 42% checking three to five times a day, 28% checking 10 to 20 times, and 19% checking more than 20 times, according to ZeroBounce’s 2026 Email Statistics Report.
• Small businesses are particularly reliant on email: 41% of SMBs cite email marketing as one of the channels driving the most business in 2026, second to social media at 68%, according to Constant Contact.
• Consumers report inbox overload: 67% prefer short emails, and 46% say relevance is what makes them consistently open brand emails rather than frequency, according to ZeroBounce.

For Shopify stores, Shopify Messaging lets you create and send emails directly from the Shopify admin, with the first 10,000 monthly sends included free.

Email marketing budget statistics

For store owners weighing email against other marketing channels, these email marketing statistics show where budgets are heading.

• The global email marketing software market was valued at $1.7 billion in 2025 and is projected to reach $4.27 billion by 2034, per Fortune Business Insights.
• Some 44% of teams in 2025 were able to produce and send a marketing email in less than a few days, with another 32% taking a few days to one week, compared with 62% needing two weeks or more in 2024, per Litmus’s State of Email 2025 report.
• An overwhelming majority of marketing teams (79.2%) expected a budget increase in 2026 over 2025, with 21.2% expecting a significant increase, per data from HubSpot.
• As many as 68% of small business owners planned to increase marketing budgets in 2026, and 74% expected to spend more time on marketing, per Constant Contact.

Email marketing benchmarks

Industry benchmarks help store owners gauge whether their open rates, click-through rates, and conversion rates are on track. Numbers vary widely by sector, so compare against your category, not the global average.

Klaviyo analyzed data from more than 183,000 brands for its 2026 benchmark report, splitting the data between one-off email marketing campaigns and behavior-triggered automated campaigns. The findings show a clear gap in campaign performance between the two:

• The average open rate across all industries is 31%, with the top 10% of performers averaging 45.1%.
• The average campaign click-through rate is 1.69%; for automated flows, click-through rates reach 5.58%, more than three times higher.
• The average campaign placed order rate is 0.16%; for automated flows, it’s 2.11%, about 13 times higher.

Open rates vary by industry. From Klaviyo’s 2026 benchmark data:

• Clothing and accessories: 33.1%
• Food and beverage: 31.2%
• Health and beauty: 30.5%
• Office supplies: 28.9%

Klaviyo’s data puts the campaign click-through rate for clothing and accessories at 1.83%, food and beverage at 1.7%, health and beauty at 1.24%, and toys and hobbies at 2.03%.

MailerLite’s 2025 benchmarks, drawn from 3.6 million campaigns across 181,000 accounts, place the median ecommerce open rate at 32.67% and the click-through rate at 1.07%. MailerLite also reported a median click-to-open rate of 4.01% for ecommerce.

One caveat: Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection inflates reported open rates by automatically firing tracking pixels for any user with the feature enabled. Both Klaviyo and MailerLite call this out in their 2026 reports, leaving click-through rates as the more reliable engagement metric.

Email ROI statistics

For ecommerce merchants, email marketing ROI ranks among the highest of any digital marketing channel, and much of that return comes from automated sends.

• Email marketing generates between $36 and $42 in revenue for every dollar spent on average, Omnisend reported in 2026.
• For B2B brands, email marketing ranks among the top three ROI-generating channels of 2026, alongside paid social media and content marketing, according to HubSpot.
• Automated flows generated nearly 41% of email revenue from just 5.3% of sends in 2026, according to Klaviyo.
• Email click-to-conversion rates jumped 53% year over year in 2025, from 5.9% to 9%, according to Omnisend.

Shopify Messaging includes pre-built marketing automation templates for abandoned cart and purchase abandonment communications, among others.

For a deeper dive into building flows, see Shopify’s guides to automated email campaigns, post-sale emails, and email marketing examples for design and copy ideas. To compare provider options like Klaviyo, Omnisend, Mailchimp, and Campaign Monitor, see Shopify’s roundup of email marketing services.

Mobile email marketing statistics

The data below covers email client share, the impact of Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection on mobile email opens, and smartphone adoption statistics..

• Apple Mail accounted for 62.26% of email opens, Gmail accounted for 27.3%, and Outlook desktop accounted for 5.83% in July 2026, according to Litmus.
• Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection now impacts roughly 55% to 60% of all email opens, Litmus also reports.
• About 91% of US adults owned a smartphone in 2025, and 16% of owners were “smartphone-only” internet users, according to Pew Research Center.

For more on optimizing campaigns, see Shopify’s guides to email marketing best practices and email A/B testing.

Email subject line statistics

Email subject lines are the first thing email recipients see, and small choices around length and personalization can lift open rates.

• Email subject lines between 20 and 40 characters have the highest open rates, with top-performing campaigns 45% more likely to fall in this range, MailerLite reported in 2025.
• Roughly 48% of marketing professionals from selected countries used personalized subject lines in more than half of their email campaigns in 2024, according to Statista.

For more on subject line craft, see Shopify’s guides to writing newsletter subject lines and newsletter examples for inspiration.

Email personalization and automation statistics

Personalized content and segmented email marketing campaigns, and behavior-triggered emails can outperform one-off promotional email broadcasts.

• Customer segmentation driving relevant content can yield an email marketing ROI of $50 per dollar spent, Litmus reported in 2025.
• Some 74% of consumers expect brands to provide more personalized shopping experiences, according to Klaviyo’s 2025 future of consumer marketing report.
• Automated emails earned 16 times more revenue per send in 2025 than scheduled campaigns, according to Omnisend. This is attributed to reaching shoppers at high-intent moments
• Back-in-stock emails were the highest-converting automated emails in 2025 at 6.46%, according to Omnisend.
• Nearly one-third of people who click an automated email make a purchase, according to Omnisend.

For Shopify stores, customer segments in the admin let you target by behavior, purchase history, and tags. Shopify Messaging lets you send personalized messages based on these segments.

Boost Auto Founder Adam Wolfe points to customer profiles as a reason segmented campaigns work. 

“Our deep understanding of car data means we can suggest the perfect fit for each customer, driving both satisfaction and repeat business,” Adam says.

Tique Chandler, founder of Chandler Honey, describes how a simple welcome email automation can save time. 

“If anyone’s signing up for my newsletter, they are getting a ‘Hey, here’s Tique. Here’s a little bit about the brand,’ a couple days later. ‘Here’s some recipes you might like. Here’s some more things that you might find interesting.’” she says in a Shopify Masters interview. “Just getting sequences like that set up really allows me to do less work on the ecommerce side and lets my conversion rate be much better.”

For more on building flows that convert, see Shopify’s guides to abandoned cart emails, transactional emails, and product launch emails.

Email marketing trends in 2026

Here are three categories to keep an eye on when it comes to email marketing:

AI in email marketing

AI adoption has become a routine part of any modern email marketing strategy. Some ways email marketing teams are putting it to work:

• Roughly 80% of marketers report using AI for content creation, according to HubSpot’s 2025 AI Trends for Marketers report.

• Generative AI usage for email is accelerating: nearly half of marketers (49%) in 2025 used generative AI for static copy creation, according to Litmus. AI-powered image generation also grew 340% year over year.
• At least 41% of companies used AI-driven analytics in 2025, according to Litmus.

Lindsey Carter, founder of SET Active, describes how AI changed her team’s approach. 

“[We hired] this company called Black Crow AI, and it was the first time we dabbled with AI. It was a way to optimize your email flows. AI would tell you what works and what doesn’t,” she says in a Shopify Masters interview.

For Shopify stores, Sidekick can draft subject lines, body copy, and send-time recommendations directly inside Shopify Messaging.

Deliverability and authentication

In 2024, Gmail and Yahoo introduced bulk sender requirements, and Microsoft followed suit the following year. The rules now require SPF (Sender Policy Framework), DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail), and DMARC (Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance) authentication for senders pushing more than 5,000 messages per day. Yahoo doesn’t specify a threshold. Support for easy unsubscribing is required, along with a spam complaint rate below 0.3%. Precise rules may vary between email platforms. The data below covers deliverability difficulty, current inbox placement rates, and how unsubscribe rates have shifted.

• Staying out of spam was the top challenge for 48% of senders, according to Mailgun’s 2025 email deliverability report.
• Inbox placement was divided into 83.5% of emails arriving in inboxes, 6.7% going to spam, and 9.8% going missing, according to Validity’s 2025 Email Deliverability Benchmark Report.
• The median unsubscribe rate across campaigns more than doubled, from 0.08% to 0.22% in 2025, according to MailerLite.

For more on staying out of the spam folder, see Shopify’s email deliverability guide.

Send cadence

When ecommerce stores send emails can matter as much as what they send them. The data below covers high-engagement windows by day, time, and frequency.

• Peak times for open rates in 2025 were usually between 9 a.m. and 11 a.m. every day of the week, except for Friday, when open rates peaked around 6 p.m., per MailerLite
• Weekly senders had a 33.22% open rate and 4.87% click rate in 2025, with twice-weekly senders reaching the highest click rate at 5.31%, per MailerLite.
• During holiday peaks, emails sent in the evening at around 7 p.m. saw the highest engagement, with lunchtime emails (11 a.m. to 1 p.m.) outperforming on Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and Green Monday, Litmus reported in 2025.

Canyon Coffee cofounder Ally Walsh describes how the brand uses cadence to build relationships beyond product sales. 

“We’ve been very consistent with our newsletters. We do about two to three a week. They range from selling coffee products to journals, interviews with artists, musicians, chefs—content that’s not related to coffee that people have found inspiring through the years,” she says in a Shopify Masters interview.

How to measure email marketing performance

For ecommerce stores, four metrics anchor any email strategy: open rates, click-through rates, conversion rates, and revenue per send.

• Open rates. Across all industries, the average campaign open rate is around 31%, per Klaviyo. Note that Apple Mail Privacy Protection inflates this number for any list with significant Apple Mail share.
• Click-through rates. The average campaign click-through rate is 1.69%, and the average automated flow click-through rate is 5.58%, per Klaviyo’s 2026 benchmark report. Click-through rates are a more reliable engagement metric due to mail privacy protection.
• Conversion (placed order) rates. The average campaign placed order rate is 0.16%; automated flows average 2.11%, per Klaviyo.
• Revenue per send. Automated emails generated an average revenue of $2.87 per send in 2025 versus 18¢ for one-off campaigns, per Omnisend.

Shopify Messaging analytics for marketing emails surface in the admin dashboard along with the rest of your store metrics. You can also tag your email links with custom UTM parameters to attribute revenue back to specific campaigns.

For a deeper breakdown of each metric, see Shopify’s email marketing metrics guide.