Charts: Global Email Volume, Users, Marketing

The world’s first email was sent in the early 1970s. Since then email has evolved into a vital digital marketing tool.

The number of global emails sent has climbed each year as the internet has become more accessible. Over 306 billion emails were sent daily in 2020. That number will rise to roughly 376.4 billion per day by 2025.

Despite the popularity of mobile messaging and chat apps, email remains an important element of everyday life. The number of global email users reached roughly 4 billion in 2020 and will likely climb to 4.6 billion by 2025. The worldwide population in January 2022 is approximately 7.9 billion.

Recipients are spending less time reading brand emails. From January to August 2021, global recipients spent an average of 10 seconds reading a single brand email. That reading time peaked in 2018 at 13.4 seconds per email before declining in recent years, leaving marketers with an even smaller window to engage readers.

Email Challenges, Tactics

Marketers have made strides in overcoming some of the challenges of email marketing. However, they continue to face difficulties. Validity (a data provider) and Demand Metric (a marketing platform) surveyed (PDF) email marketers worldwide from large and small companies — B2B and B2C — to examine their challenges and tactics.

According to the survey report, marketers in 2020 were less likely to use basic email marketing tactics such as deliverability optimization and list management compared to 2019.

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