Email marketing statistics for 2026, in plain English.

Apple Mail now accounts for 62.26% of tracked opens, according to Litmus (July 2026, over 1 billion opens). Litmus estimates Apple’s privacy feature affects about 55% to 60% of all email opens. Omeda measured the total open rate jumping from 22.6% to 40.5% across about 2 billion emails after the feature launched.

It also broke device data. Before the change, in May 2021, Litmus measured 49.7% of opens on mobile. After it, the tool could no longer tell which device most opens came from. So be careful with any exact “share of emails opened on mobile” figure from after 2021.

There is no single “average open rate” for 2026. These range from 20.73% to 43.46%, mostly because of how opens are counted and who the customers are. Click rates are much closer together, from 0.74% to 3.25%, because Apple’s feature does not change them.

Most email tools report about 98.5% as “delivered”, because only about 1.5% of emails bounce. But delivered does not mean inbox. Spam placement nearly doubled during 2024, from 4.5% in the first quarter to 8.6% in the last.

SPF, DKIM and DMARC are settings that prove an email really comes from your domain. Your email provider or web host can help you set them up. Red Sift found DMARC use rose from 8.62% to about 13.38% of domains in 2024, so most domains still do not have it.

Treat 0.30% as the danger line, not a goal. Klaviyo says healthy spam complaint rates are below 0.01%.

You may see “$36 for every $1” and “$42 for every $1”. Both come from Litmus surveys, in 2020 and 2019. They are marketers’ own estimates. In the same survey, 45% said they measured email ROI poorly or not at all. So treat these as rough guides.

The newest single average comes from the DMA Marketer Email Tracker 2026: about £41 for every £1, from a survey of 250 UK marketers.

Two things to keep in mind. Automated emails go out at moments when people are already keen to buy, so part of their success is timing. And more people unsubscribe from automations: 0.59%, against 0.20% for campaigns.

Omnisend looked at about 26 billion emails. The gap between the best and worst day of the week was only about 1.6 percentage points. That is smaller than the 13.14 point effect of Apple’s privacy feature. So pick your send day based on your goals, and do not worry too much about it.

In this large dataset, subject lines with the person’s name did not do better. Only 9.67% of senders used them, so this does not prove names hurt. GetResponse suggests adding a personal touch in the email body instead.

SMS gets far more clicks per message. Email earns about 4 times more per automated message. Many local businesses use both: SMS for quick reminders and review requests, email for longer updates. Note that SMS open rates cannot be measured reliably, so compare clicks. Postscript measured SMS click rates of 2.87% to 8.01% across 17,000+ online stores, lower than Omnisend, because the stores and click definitions differ.

There is very little public test data showing how much AI improves email results. One Klaviyo figure shows emails with AI product suggestions getting a 3.75% click rate against a 1.69% average, but without a proper comparison group. Until better tests exist, judge AI by your own results.

Last checked September 2026. When a source publishes newer data, we update the figure and the date.