When it comes to sales emails, the old adage holds true — you only get one chance to make a first impression. To help you stand out in people’s inboxes, I’ve rounded up a list of sales email statistics to help you shape your subject lines, boost your open rates, and get potential customers to follow through and hit “buy.”
When you’re ready to craft your next email, take a gander at HubSpot’s free, AI-powered email template builder. This tool helps you craft eye-catching emails, track performance, and save time by taking your most successful templates and tweaking them for your next campaign. Why mess with success?
Ready to dodge the spam folder? Let’s get started.
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Sales Email Statistics
Year after year, email is still a powerful tool for marketers to promote products and services and engage new and current customers.
Email marketing campaigns have historically given businesses a high ROI, but with their many different uses, there are other benchmarks that businesses could and should be paying attention to.
Here are some stats that show how and why marketers love to use email.
The Return on Investment
- On average, businesses net $36 for every dollar spent on email marketing (Litmus, 2024).
- 40% of marketers say email is the most effective sales channel (HubSpot 2024 State of Sales report).
- In 2023, the global email market was valued at $8.3 billion (Statista, 2024)
- 30% of companies plan to invest more in email marketing in 2024 (Litmus, 2024).
- 25% of marketers say that they get the highest quality leads from email marketing (HubSpot 2024 State of Sales report).
How AI is Changing Email Marketing
With the rise of AI, marketers now have a new slate of tools to help optimize emails and boost their open and click-through rates. These statistics show that marketers are readily incorporating AI into their workflows, and they are seeing positive results.
- 45% of companies use artificial intelligence (AI) to help them with their email marketing (Litmus, 2024).
- 21% want to start using AI in their email workflows in 2024 (Litmus, 2024).
- 47% of marketers said that using AI had an extremely positive impact on their email campaigns (Forbes, 2023).
- 45% of marketers say that the use of AI will be integral to their email marketing moving forward (Forbes, 2023).
- 50.7% say that emails enhanced with AI tools are more effective than emails created with more traditional methods (Statista, 2024).
What about open rates?
As of 2025, the average open rate across all businesses has increased to 42.35% — but don’t get too excited or too depressed. Industry averages can vary widely.
According to Mailerlite, some sectors have high average open rates. Religious institutions, in particular, had the highest open rates at 59.70%, while travel and leisure had the lowest average open rate at 22.57%.
Check how your numbers compare with these open rate statistics.
- The average email open rate across all industries is 42.35% (Mailerlite, 2025).
- The average email open rate in the marketing and advertising industry is 39.05% (Mailerlite, 2025).
- When it comes to welcome emails, open rates are 83.63% (GetResponse, 2024).
- The average click-through rate of all emails for all industries is 2.00% (Mailerlite, 2025).
- Click-through rates ranged from 0.77% to 4.36% across sectors (Mailerlite, 2025).
- Adding images boosts both the open rate — 43.12% compared to 35.79% — and click-through rate — 4.84% compared to 1.64% (GetResponse, 2024).
- Automated emails generated 41% of email orders, despite accounting for only 2% of the emails being sent (Omnisend, 2024).
- Automated emails are incredibly successful at making sales. One in three people who open an automated email end up purchasing something. One in two people who open welcome cart and cart abandonment emails end up making a purchase (Omnisend, 2024).
Email Subject Line Statistics
Time to focus on what catches a reader’s eye first — the email subject line.
There’s a lot of debate online about how long subject lines should be, what words should be in them, and even to emoji or not to emoji, but I’ve gathered some statistics that clear these debates up and help you achieve the KPIs you’ve been yearning for.
What You Need to Know
- 43% of people open an email based on the subject line (Zerobounce, 2025).
- 47% of marketers A/B test their subject lines (Zippia, 2023).
- Emails with shorter subject lines are more likely to be opened (GetResponse, 2024).
- The average subject line contains 44 characters (Aweber, 2024).
- Subject lines between 61-70 characters had the highest open rate at 43.38% (GetResponse, 2024).
- Emails with shorter subject lines also had higher click-through rates. The sweet spot seemed to be around 41-50 characters, as they had the highest click-through rate at 17.57% (GetResponse, 2024).
What to Add and What to Avoid
Thankfully, multiple studies have revealed the best ways to make eye-catching and scroll-stopping email subject lines. Personalized subject lines are a big one. Luckily, HubSpot allows you to add personalization tokens to your email subject lines.
There are also other ways of jazzing up your subject lines, like mixing in certain keywords or adding numbers. On the flipside, beware of certain things that could hurt your KPIs.
- Personalized subject lines increase open rates by at least 50% (Zippia, 2023).
- 36% of marketers say that they personalize the subject line or preview text the most (Litmus, 2024).
- Adding the word “free” on a subject line boosted open rates by 10% (Zippia, 2023).
- Urgent subject lines increase open rates by 22% on average (Zippia, 2023).
- Adding the word “video” to your subject line increases open rates by 7-13% (Zippia, 2023).
- Adding numbers to subject lines boosts open rates by 57% (Zippia, 2023).
- The word “newsletter” decreased open rates by 18.7% (Zippia, 2023).
- Sadly, emojis in subject lines don’t seem to help increase open rates or click-through rates. Emails with no emojis in their subject lines had higher open rates (42.23% vs. 37.5%) and click-through rates (4.16% vs 3.32%) (GetResponse, 2024).
- Only 5% of email subject lines have emojis (Zippia, 2023).
Pro tip: Check out this HubSpot article if you want more open rate statistics.
It’s time to craft your own email subject lines.
Now that we have reviewed some sales email statistics, it’s time to craft your own email, engage current and potential customers, and bag some conversions. While benchmarks and statistics are helpful to guide and gauge your strategy, I recommend you keep testing, experimenting, and iterating as you go.
