Five email marketing stats to get you ready for 2025

“The best time to send that email was yesterday.”—email marketers, probably.

No, that’s not an official quote. But email marketing has been one of the more robust channels throughout the years, despite every brand and their dog having their own newsletter.

So since you probably do some email marketing—or you’re about to—we’ve found some new, interesting data about email that you might not often come across.

So let’s whip out some charts.

1) Back in stock emails are converting like crazy

Email is traditionally a high-converting channel. 

But there’s one email type that converts even better than your average email:

See that? Users just can’t resist buying an item as soon as it is back in stock. Especially if it was a popular product. And if the scarcity was real.

In that case, restock emails convert at a more than a double rate of welcome emails, which come second at 2.74% and cart abandonment at 2.56%.

But keep in mind: Back in stock emails are usually converting past-purchasers and loyalists who are eagerly anticipating the product. 

There are also first-time buyers who are pushed by scarcity effects and who might jump at the opportunity to try before stock runs out again. 

Compared to that, welcome emails and cart abandonments usually try to acquire new users—which makes their conversion rate quite good.

On the other hand, product review emails have a surprisingly high conversion rate of above 1%, showing that informational sequences can also bring revenue. 

Cross-sell emails, on the other hand, tend not to convert well. 

Which makes sense, really—if you’ve already bought a product, you’ll be less inclined to purchase a similar or complementary product because you’d have to go through the “hassle” again.

What can you do: Cross-selling a product in real time on your website as someone buys is a more effective strategy, because customers can buy both products at once.

Especially if you offer incentives like discounts or free shipping.

You can better leverage cross-sells on the website itself. When users are still willing to bundle products and save money on fees—especially if you provide initiatives like discounts or free shipping. 

2) Email open rates are in steady decline

If you’re seeing lower open rates, you aren’t the only one.

The industry seems to be having a slight downtrend when it comes to open rates:

Since the start of the year, unique open rate fell compared to the years prior.

And keep in mind that this is just the measured open rate, without accounting for the impact of Apple Mail Privacy Protection, which inflated measured average opens since its adoption.

Why is it declining? A reason can be that there’s just a lot of newsletters and emails today. The newsletter fatigue is real, and there’s plenty of users who don’t unsubscribe, but aren’t opening their email.

At the same time, unique clicks and click-to-open rates are getting slightly higher over time—which can indicate that—while people don’t open emails much, those who do might be more likely to engage. 

The Crew’s take: Keep your lists clean. Pay attention to your deliverability. And you’ll have higher-intent users that are likely to interact with your emails.

3) Retail average open rates align with industry average, software and apps fall below

Good news if you’re running a local restaurant. 

Not-so-good news if you’re running email campaigns for a software company. 

Here’s how the industry average benchmarks look like:

It appears that restaurants and online communities—which includes newsletters as well—are something users open regularly. 

However, if you check the average click rate, you will notice that restaurants and venue emails don’t really have a lot of engagement—while software and apps CTR is around average. 

Social networks and online communities lead in both. 

The takeaway: Better relationships drive better results. Something that comes natural for this vertical.

If you forge and nurture relationships with your readers—or customers—and maintain list hygiene as we mentioned in previous section—there’s a big chance your emails will drive opens and clicks. 

4) The biggest advantages of email marketing? Quality tracking and targeting

…that is according to users.

And according to us as well, duh. 

But let’s take a look at what are some other advantages marketers see in direct email marketing compared to other channels:

So quality targeting, attribution, and tracking take the cake. 

However, there’s also the ability to integrate with other digital campaigns and allows you flexibility when it comes to budgeting. It’s also more affordable compared to other channels.

One underrated aspect of emails is the creative flexibility you get (35% of users agree), where you can customize almost every aspect of your email designs.

And finally, 30% of users love the possibility to personalize and customize your emails—from subject lines to automated segmentation depending on preferences, engagement, and more.

Nothing new. But seeing all these upsides listed on the chart makes email super appealing.

5) Emojis, gifs, and personalized subject lines may improve your email performance

It’s not a guarantee, but it is what most users say.

Here’s a nice chart that depicts it:

It appears that subject line personalization improved performance for 77% of users. So contrary to some belief—it works. As long as you do it well, of course. And not automate it in a way that makes you look silly. We’re talking about the typical “Hello [NAME]” stuff.

Likewise, 73% say emojis in subject lines help. And if you read our newsletter, you’ll probably notice that it works for us, too—so we can vouch for that.

Animated GIFs (72%) and personalization with dynamic content (68%) tailored to specific users or segments also bear fruit, but AI content or video content (34%) don’t move the needle much.

Therefore, try to make your content unique, with a real voice tailored to your audience—while also sprinkling in some emojis or images for extra oomph.

Hitting send in 2025

Turns out, a good email can make a difference. 

If you use email strategically and leverage every aspect of it, from back-in-stock blasts to emojis in subject lines, you might drive that little extra action that leads to conversion.

And in the words of an email doctor—keep your email list clean at all times. It should help you keep your open rates high and the audience engaged. 

Trust us, we talk about this all the time.