The State of Email Reports

Email marketing research: data and methodology

The best email marketing research requires careful data collection to deliver insights you can trust. Our email marketing research methodology gathers responses from email professionals across enterprises, mid-market companies, and emerging organizations worldwide.

This approach to email research helps us capture diverse perspectives from agencies, in-house teams, software providers, and industry consultants.

That’s what makes our State of Email reports different—full-picture insights, not just a slice of the industry.

How we conduct email marketing research

The email marketing data we use in our reports is collected in stages:

• 1. Survey planning: We create non-biased questions about the email marketing industry, including recycling questions for year-over-year comparison.
• 2. Data collection: We survey email pros across various industries to gather real-world email performance data, strategy insights, and technology adoption patterns. Each participant provides email marketing data from their campaigns and best research practices.
• 3. Quality assurance and validation: Every data point in our email research goes through a thorough validation process. Duplicates are removed, outliers get flagged, and responses are cross-referenced against known industry benchmarks. This detailed email marketing data validation is what separates findings you can act on from findings you have to second-guess.

The result is research you can use to understand how your email program stacks up to your peers and find ways to improve.

How the State of Email Report improves your email marketing reporting

The State of Email Report provides the industry-wide data and insights your team needs to move from disconnected metrics to strategic reporting. It gives you the context to understand not just your numbers, but how they compare to others.

When you build reports with peer benchmarks, you gain clarity on performance gaps and optimization priorities. Rather than setting targets blindly, you see how your send frequency, click-through rates, and ROI stack up against your industry vertical. This shifts reporting from a compliance exercise into a strategic planning tool.

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What these trends mean

The teams seeing the best returns from email in 2026 aren’t doing any magic—they’re building a stronger email foundation. They:

• Moved their email marketing reporting beyond open rates to metrics that actually connect to revenue.
• Use AI for much more than a first draft.
• Figured out that a well-timed newsletter builds more long-term value than another promotional blast.

If your email program feels like it’s plateauing, the State of Email Report shows exactly where to start: with the benchmarks for revenue-per-subscriber in your industry, and the breakdown of what top performers are actually sending.

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