Email marketing statistics: key figures by sector

In brief: With 376 billion emails sent every day and an average return of €36 for every €1 spent (DMA), emailing remains the most profitable marketing channel. In France, the average open rate reaches 33.9%. Here are the key figures by sector to put your own performance into perspective.

Email marketing in figures: a channel that carries weight

Thirty years in existence and still here. Better still: growing fast. According to Statista, 376.4 billion emails are exchanged every day in 2025, a volume expected to reach 392.5 billion the following year. As for the number of active email accounts worldwide, it has passed the 4.7 billion mark. More than one person in two has an email address.

These orders of magnitude are not merely anecdotal. For marketing teams, they confirm what they see every day: no other channel reaches so many people so directly. Social networks depend on capricious algorithms, and SMS is expensive at scale. Email, on the other hand, lands in an inbox your recipients check every day. In France, the professional mailbox is a universal working tool. And according to a HubSpot survey, three marketers out of four intend to maintain or increase their emailing budget in 2026.

The conclusion is clear: email is not merely surviving. It is gaining ground.

Open rate and click rate: the benchmarks by sector

The first reflex after a send: check the open rate. Except that since 2021, Apple has changed the game. Its Mail Privacy Protection pre-loads tracking pixels for all Apple Mail users, which artificially inflates opens. As a result, a rate displayed at 40% no longer necessarily reflects 40% of genuinely interested recipients. More and more professionals are turning to the click rate as their reference indicator.

That said, sector benchmarks remain useful for comparing your performance. The Brevo 2025 study, covering 11.9 billion emails analysed across 19,000 French companies, gives the following averages:

In B2B, the benchmarks shift. Aim for 20 to 30% opens and around 3% clicks to be in the right range. But these figures move a great deal depending on context: a newsletter sent to opt-in subscribers has nothing in common with a cold prospecting email, and the performance gap between the two can be threefold.

The click-to-open rate (CTOR), which measures the ratio of clicks to opens, gives a finer reading of content quality. It sits on average between 6% and 13% depending on the sector. Desktop recipients show a CTOR almost twice that of mobile users, according to Litmus.

Email marketing ROI: the most profitable channel

Why does emailing keep its place in marketing budgets, year after year? The answer comes down to one ratio: between 36 and 42 dollars of return for every dollar invested, according to the DMA’s annual reports. Litmus confirms this in its State of Email 2025 and adds that 18% of companies surveyed report an ROI above 7,000%.

One caveat, though. Barely 12.5% of companies say they measure this ROI properly (Litmus, same report). The others settle for tracking opens and clicks without tracing the full journey through to conversion. In other words, the true return on emailing is probably poorly understood, sometimes overestimated, sometimes undervalued.

Compared with other digital levers, email keeps a comfortable lead. SEO comes in at around 22:1, social networks at around 12:1. The reason? The cost of sending an email is negligible, and the message lands directly with the recipient without any algorithmic filter.

In B2B, the advantage is even more pronounced. Generating a lead by email regularly costs less than a LinkedIn Ads or Google Ads campaign. Provided, of course, that you work from a qualified contact database, otherwise the ROI melts like snow in the sun.

Deliverability: the figure nobody watches closely enough

Everyone scrutinises their open and click rates. Deliverability, on the other hand, often slips under the radar. Yet it is what conditions everything else: an email that never reaches the inbox will never be opened or clicked.

Validity, in its 2025 report, puts the average inbox placement rate at 83-84% worldwide. Put another way: one marketing email in six disappears before it even has a chance to be read. Spam, bounce, server rejection.

The situation has become more complicated since the major mailbox providers tightened their rules. In 2024, Google and Yahoo raised the bar for senders exceeding 5,000 emails a day: SPF, DKIM and DMARC mandatory, spam complaint rate below 0.3%, one-click unsubscribe. Microsoft followed in early 2025 for Outlook.com and Hotmail.

Those who comply with these technical requirements regularly exceed 95% deliverability. The gap with the global average is far from trivial. Do the maths on a database of 10,000 contacts: at 84% inbox placement, you lose 1,600 recipients per campaign. At 95%, only 500. That is 1,100 contacts recovered with every send, without changing a single word of your message.

Mobile vs desktop: where do your recipients read your emails?

Mobile reading dominates usage. According to Litmus, around 60% of email opens happen on a mobile device. The detailed breakdown gives 41.6% for mobile, 40.6% for webmail and 16.2% for desktop clients.

This overall figure masks sector disparities. In B2B, desktop reading remains more common than in B2C. Professionals mostly check their emails on a computer during office hours.

The real surprise is engagement. Desktop CTOR reaches 21% on average, against only 11% on mobile, according to Litmus 2025 data. A recipient who opens your email on their computer is almost twice as likely to click on a link.

The implications are direct. A technically responsive email is not enough. If your B2B audience reads mostly on desktop, concentrate your design effort on the desktop experience while keeping a functional mobile version. If you target sales profiles on the road, reverse the priority.

B2B emailing statistics: performance in a class of its own

Global statistics mix B2C newsletters, transactional emails and B2B prospecting campaigns. Yet these types have little in common in terms of performance.

In B2B prospecting, expect open rates between 15% and 25%, well below the all-sector averages. The click rate hovers between 2 and 4%, and depends enormously on three factors: the quality of the file, the relevance of the message, and the sending slot.

But the comparison with B2C stops there. In B2B, a single click can lead to a quote request worth several thousand euros. The volume of opens ultimately matters rather little compared with the quality of targeting.

A few B2B-specific benchmarks:

And the number one factor that conditions all these figures? The quality of your database. A poorly qualified file means bounces in series, a sender reputation that plummets, and B2B KPIs to track that are completely distorted. Before trying to optimise your click rates, first make sure your emails actually arrive.

What these figures mean for your strategy

Statistics are only useful if they guide concrete decisions. Here is what the key figures for 2025-2026 suggest.

ROI remains exceptional, but it assumes a clean database. Sending emails to obsolete or unqualified addresses degrades your deliverability and, by extension, your profitability. The hygiene of your contact database is not a secondary technical matter. It is a direct performance lever.

Open rates no longer tell the whole truth. With the impact of Apple MPP and automatic preview systems, the click rate and the conversion rate are becoming more reliable indicators for measuring your recipients’ real engagement. If you have not yet adjusted your dashboards, now is the time to manage your campaigns with data.

Deliverability has become a prerequisite, not a bonus. The new requirements from Google, Yahoo and Microsoft have raised the minimum technical level for reaching the inbox. If you have not configured SPF, DKIM and DMARC correctly, a significant share of your emails ends up in spam.

Mobile dominates opens, but desktop generates clicks. This asymmetry should influence your design, your copy and your calls to action. An email read on mobile has to convince in a few seconds. An email consulted on desktop can afford more depth.

Compare your results with the open rates by sector before drawing hasty conclusions. A 25% open rate can be excellent in B2B prospecting and mediocre for a non-profit newsletter.

FAQ

What is the average open rate of an email campaign in France?

According to the Brevo 2025 study (11.9 billion emails analysed, 19,000 French companies), the all-sector average stands at 33.9%. Bear in mind that Apple Mail Privacy Protection inflates this figure: the “phantom” opens recorded by Apple pull the average upwards.

What is the average ROI of email marketing?

The DMA and Litmus agree on a range of 36 to 42 dollars generated for every dollar invested. No other digital channel comes close: SEO runs at around 22:1, social networks at around 12:1.

How many emails are sent every day worldwide?

376.4 billion according to Statista for 2025, with a projection of 392.5 billion in 2026. This total includes everything: personal, professional, transactional and marketing emails combined.

What is a good click rate for a B2B email campaign?

In B2B, count on a 2 to 4% click rate for a standard campaign. The CTOR (click-to-open rate, i.e. the ratio of clicks to opens) varies from 6 to 13% depending on the sector and the nature of the send.

What percentage of emails actually reaches the inbox?

The average inbox placement rate is 83 to 84% worldwide according to Validity. This means that one marketing email in six does not reach its recipient. Senders who follow technical best practices generally achieve more than 95%.

Does mobile email reading exceed desktop?

Around 60% of email opens happen on mobile according to Litmus. However, the desktop click rate is almost twice that of mobile, making it a higher-performing engagement channel despite a lower volume of opens.