Email marketing statistics: how to source one you can actually stand behind
· 1 min read · The Bulk Mail team
Email marketing statistics circulate the way folklore does. A number appears in a vendor report, gets quoted in a listicle, gets re-quoted without the year, and eventually turns up in a pitch deck as established fact with no way back to its origin.
The chase-it-back test
Take any statistic you are about to use and follow its citations backwards. You are looking for four things, and a number that cannot supply all four does not belong in your deck.
- A primary source — the organisation that collected the data, not the blog that repeated it.
- A year. Email statistics age badly; anything spanning the last few years of client privacy changes may measure a different world.
- A population. Whose customers, in which countries, sending what kind of mail.
- A definition. "Open", "engagement" and "conversion" mean different things to different vendors.
Where the numbers come from
Nearly all public email statistics are vendor reports: a platform aggregating its own customers. That is not disqualifying — it is often the only data that exists at scale — but it is a sample of one company’s users, and it is published by someone with an interest in the conclusion.
The most honest thing a vendor can say about industry statistics is which ones it does not have. We do not publish benchmark figures, because ours would be an average of our own users, measured our way.
What to measure instead
Your own send history answers the questions a benchmark cannot: which subject lines get opened by your audience, what time of day works for your recipients, how quickly your proposals get read. That data is small, specific, and correct — three things no industry statistic can offer at once.
Start collecting your own numbers.
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