Email Marketing Statistics (2026): 59 Sourced Figures

This page collects figures on email use, campaign performance, bulk sending rules and the companies that sell email marketing platforms. Every number links to the document or dataset that first published it. Most figures come from official sources: Eurostat, the US National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA), the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and the FBI Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3). Company figures come from earnings releases filed with the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). Performance benchmarks and spam data come from vendors and are labeled as vendor-reported. For a comparison of the products, see the StatWharf comparison of email marketing software.

Key figures at a glance

Method

• Data window. Figures date from 2015 to October 2026. Older values appear only as a baseline for a trend. The page prefers the latest release of each series. The NTIA survey for November 2023 is the most recent edition in the NTIA data file at the check date.
• Primary sources only. Each figure links to the body that first published it. These are government agencies (Eurostat, NTIA, FTC, FBI) and mailbox providers (Google and Yahoo). They also include company releases filed with the SEC and the vendors that ran their own studies. Statistics aggregators, roundup articles and blogs that re-quote other sources were excluded. Vendor data are labeled as vendor-reported with the vendor named.
• Checks. StatWharf Editorial opened each source in October 2026 and checked that the figure and its date appear there. Values from the Eurostat and NTIA data files are rounded to one decimal place. Figures not found on a reachable primary source were left out.
• No modeling. No value on this page is estimated or calculated by StatWharf.

The sources measure different things. Eurostat counts people aged 16 to 74 who used the internet to send or receive email in the previous three months. NTIA counts adult internet users who say they use email. Vendor benchmarks describe campaigns sent by the vendor’s own customers. They are not a sample of all senders. Comparisons are valid within one source, not across sources.

How many people use email

European Union

Eurostat measures email use in its annual survey on ICT usage in households and by individuals. The indicator counts people who used the internet to send or receive email.

The EU share has risen every year in the series since 2012. It was 67.4% in 2015, 73.2% in 2019 and 78.7% in 2023. The gap between member states is wide. More than nine in ten people in the Netherlands use email online. Fewer than half do in Romania. A sender with a pan-European list reaches very different shares of the population in each market.

United States

NTIA runs the Internet Use Survey as a supplement to the Census Bureau’s Current Population Survey. The survey asks internet users which online activities they do. NTIA publishes the results in a data file behind its Data Explorer.

Email use among US internet users is close to universal and stable. The share moved by less than one point between 2021 and 2023. Older users are the least likely group to use email, but more than four in five still do.

Email marketing performance benchmarks

No government body publishes open or click rates. The most recent large public benchmark found at the check date comes from MailerLite, an email marketing vendor. MailerLite published it on December 3, 2025. It covers 3.6 million campaigns sent from more than 181,000 accounts. The figures below are vendor-reported by MailerLite.

MailerLite also reports benchmarks by industry. Two examples show how wide the range is.

• E-commerce senders had a benchmark open rate of 32.67% and a click rate of 1.07%.
• Non-profit senders had a benchmark open rate of 52.38% and a click rate of 2.90%.

Open rates need care. Privacy features in some mail apps load images automatically, which can record an open the reader never made. Click rates are a firmer measure of engagement. The unsubscribe rate in 2025 was more than double the 2024 rate. MailerLite attributes the rise in part to Gmail changes that let people unsubscribe from bulk mail without opening it. A rising unsubscribe rate after a mailbox rule change does not by itself mean content got worse.

Sending rules and compliance

Mailbox provider requirements

Google and Yahoo set requirements for anyone who sends email to their users. Google’s rules took effect in 2024. The rules apply to every email marketing platform, because the platform sends on the customer’s behalf.

Google states that its rules for all senders started on February 1, 2024. Senders above the 5,000 daily threshold must also set up SPF, DKIM and DMARC authentication. Yahoo sets the same 0.3% spam rate ceiling. For marketers, the practical effect is that list hygiene and authentication now decide inbox placement at the two largest consumer mailbox providers.

US law

The CAN-SPAM Act governs commercial email in the United States. The FTC enforces it.

• Each separate email that violates the Act is subject to penalties of up to $53,088.
• Senders must honor an opt-out request within 10 business days.

The Yahoo two-day window is stricter than the legal minimum. A sender can comply with the law and still fall short of a mailbox provider’s rule.

Spam, fraud and email security

Marketing email competes in the inbox with spam and fraud. That affects how filters treat legitimate senders and how much recipients trust a message.

Fraud reported to US agencies

The FTC Consumer Sentinel Network Data Book 2024, published in 2025, reports how fraudsters reached consumers.

The FBI IC3 2025 Annual Report covers complaints filed by individuals and businesses in 2025. Business email compromise (BEC) is a scam in which a criminal uses email to trick a business into sending money.

Phishing and spoofing was the crime type with the most complaints to IC3 in 2025. BEC was the second-largest category by reported loss, after investment fraud. These are complaints filed with the FBI, so they undercount the true totals.

Spam volume

Kaspersky, a security vendor, publishes spam data from its own products. The figures below are vendor-reported by Kaspersky and were released on February 11, 2026.

• Spam made up 44.99% of global email traffic in 2025.
• Users of its products encountered over 144 million malicious and potentially unwanted email attachments in 2025.
• That was a 15% increase on the previous year.

Kaspersky counts scams, phishing and malware within spam. Its telemetry covers its own users only. With close to half of email traffic classed as spam, filters are strict. That is the context for the authentication and spam rate rules above.

Email marketing platform vendors

Klaviyo is a public company that calls itself a B2C CRM. Its platform covers email, text messaging, WhatsApp and other channels. Braze sells a customer engagement platform in which email is one channel among several. Both file results with the SEC. Most other well-known email marketing vendors are private or sit inside larger groups that do not report email revenue separately.

Klaviyo

Klaviyo had over 167,000 customers at the end of 2024. Its customer count grew to over 193,000 a year later and to more than 205,000 by mid-2026. The share of SMB+ customers using text messaging and WhatsApp rose from 26.1% to 29.6% during 2025. Many email buyers now add a second channel.

Braze

Braze has far fewer customers than Klaviyo, at much higher revenue per customer. Its fiscal 2026 release links its bookings growth to strength in its enterprise segment. Its revenue covers all channels, not only email.

What the figures show

Three points stand out. First, email reach is broad and still growing in Europe. Eurostat puts email use at 81.6% of people aged 16 to 74 in 2025, up from 67.4% in 2015. In the United States, NTIA finds that 92.4% of adult internet users use email.

Second, the rules for reaching the inbox are now stricter. Gmail and Yahoo both cap spam rates at 0.3%, and Yahoo expects unsubscribes to be honored within two days. The unsubscribe rate in the MailerLite data rose from 0.08% to 0.22% in a year as one-click unsubscribe spread.

Third, the platforms that send marketing email are growing fast. Klaviyo grew revenue 26% in its latest quarter. Braze grew 26.2%. Both report growth in customers that add text messaging and other channels to email.

For a buyer, the figures point to three checks. Check that the platform handles SPF, DKIM and DMARC setup. Check that it processes unsubscribes fast enough for the two-day rule. Check that it reports click rates as well as open rates, since open rates are less reliable. Features, pricing tiers and these sending controls are compared on the StatWharf comparison of email marketing software.

Where to go next

Other StatWharf data pages are listed in the research directory. The next update follows two releases: Eurostat’s 2026 ICT usage results and the FTC Consumer Sentinel Data Book for 2025, once its email contact figures are available on ftc.gov. Send corrections to any figure to the editorial address below.

Factual corrections are free: editorial@statwharf.com.