Email marketing statistics are the numbers that describe how many emails are sent, how many arrive, how many are opened and clicked, and what they earn. In the UK the problem isn't finding them: it's that the main sources give figures that don't fit together. The DMA puts the average UK open rate at 35.9%, GetResponse at 39.98% for Great Britain, and on 10 October 2026 Google UK's AI Overview for "what is a good email open rate" answered with anything from 20% to 43%, without saying where the gap comes from.
Below are the UK figures traced back to the primary source, with year and sample, the international ones labelled as such, and an explanation of why the numbers differ. None of them is taken from a second-hand roundup. For figures on other channels, see our collection of marketing statistics.
Email marketing in the UK in 2026 in 14 numbers
The table brings together figures checked at source on 10 October 2026. The "Market" column says where each figure was measured: an international benchmark doesn't describe a UK audience, and we flag it row by row.
| Figure | Value | Market | Source and period |
|---|---|---|---|
| Monthly reach of Gmail among online adults | 58% (55% in 2024) | UK, adults online | Ofcom Online Nation 2025, May 2025 |
| Daily audience of the Gmail app | 16.8 million (14.4 million in May 2024) | UK, adults | Ofcom Online Nation 2025, May 2025 |
| Delivery rate | 98% (B2C: 99.2%) | UK, seven email service providers | DMA Email Benchmarking Report 2025, 2024 data |
| Open rate | 35.9% | UK | DMA, 2024 data |
| Unique click rate | 2.3% (third rise in a row) | UK | DMA, 2024 data |
| Open rate | 39.98% | Great Britain, GetResponse customers | GetResponse Benchmarks 2024, 2023 data |
| Click-through rate (CTR) | 2.74% (global average 3.25%) | Great Britain | GetResponse, 2023 data |
| Click-to-open rate (CTOR) | 6.86% (global average 8.62%) | Great Britain | GetResponse, 2023 data |
| Share of opens from Apple Mail | 62.26% | World, over 1 billion opens | Litmus, July 2026 |
| Emails delivered to the inbox (inbox placement) | 87.8% in the UK, 89.1% in Europe, 83.5% worldwide | UK and world, seed lists | Validity Benchmark 2025, 2024 data |
| Conversion rate of automated emails | 1.49% against 0.08% for campaigns | International, 27,000 e-commerce brands | Omnisend, 2025 data |
| Threshold for Gmail's bulk sender rules | about 5,000 emails in 24 hours | World | Google, in force since February 2024 |
| Unsubscribe rate | 0.15% (global average 0.15%) | Great Britain | GetResponse, 2023 data |
| Tracking pixels in marketing emails | Covered by PECR regulation 6 (storage and access) | UK | ICO guidance on storage and access technologies, April 2026 |
Who reads email in the UK: Gmail alone reaches 58% of online adults
The UK no longer has an official figure for the share of adults who use email: the ONS has discontinued its "Internet access, households and individuals" release and points to Ofcom instead. The closest measure is in Ofcom's Online Nation 2025: Gmail reached 58% of UK online adults in May 2025, up from 55% in 2024 and 51% in 2023. Its daily reach went from 32% to 36% in a year, and the app's daily audience from 14.4 to 16.8 million people. Ofcom doesn't publish comparable figures for Outlook, Yahoo or iCloud, so 58% is a floor for one provider, not the total.
Worldwide, the Radicati Group estimates 4,481 million email users in 2024 and 361.6 billion messages sent and received every day, with a projection of 4,970 million users and 424.2 billion messages a day in 2028. These are a research firm's estimates, not counts: they give you the order of magnitude, not the size of a list.
For anyone marketing in the UK, the useful figure is the Ofcom one, and it says something about where your emails are read. If a third of adults open Gmail every day, a consumer list will be heavy on Gmail addresses, and Google's sender rules (further down) apply to most of it. Business lists look different, with more company domains on Microsoft 365. Which channels to keep alongside email is the question we work through in our guide to small business marketing.
How much UK businesses send, and how it performs
The UK source with the broadest sample is the DMA's Email Benchmarking Report, built on anonymised data from UK email service providers. The 2025 edition, published on 4 June 2025 with Marigold, covers 2024 sends from seven providers. The DMA doesn't publish the total volume on the public page, only that 2024 was a record year for emails sent.
- Delivery rate rose to 98% in 2024, with B2C senders at 99.2%.
- The average open rate climbed to 35.9%, still rising after Apple's Mail Privacy Protection; the DMA treats 2022 as the new baseline year.
- The unique click rate reached 2.3%, the third rise in a row.
- The 2026 edition, published on 9 July 2026 with Validity and data from six providers, reports "record" click-through rates and falling unsubscribes, but its figures are for DMA members only.
The DMA sums up its 2025 data by saying "email is thriving". On these numbers the UK picture is better than the Italian one, where the market's largest observatory (MailUp, 19 billion emails in 2025) recorded falling clicks per open and a delivery rate down from 99% to 97.8%. In the UK, volumes went up and clicks went up with them. The catch is that the full tables, by sector and by type of email, sit behind DMA membership, so the public figures are averages across very different senders.
UK open rate: why the sources say 36% and 43%
The open rate is the percentage of delivered emails that register as opened. The number you read depends on three choices made by whoever calculates it: whether it counts unique opens or all of them, whether it removes automatic opens, and which year and customer base it measures. Here's how the sources most quoted in the UK compare.
| Source | Open rate | Data year | Sample | What it counts |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| DMA Email Benchmarking Report | 35.9% | 2024 | Seven UK email service providers | Opens, still rising after Apple MPP |
| GetResponse Benchmarks | 39.98% (Great Britain) | 2023 | Over 4.4 billion messages, senders with at least 500 contacts | Opens, including Apple's automatic ones |
| MailerLite Benchmarks | 43.46% | December 2024 to November 2025 | 3.6 million campaigns from 181,000 accounts, world | Opens, with a warning about Apple MPP |
| Omnisend Benchmarks | 30.41% (campaigns) | 2025 | Over 20 billion emails, 27,000 e-commerce brands, international | Campaign opens |
MailerLite's 43.46% is the number Google UK's AI Overview puts at the top for "what is a good email open rate" (210 searches a month in the UK, DataForSEO, October 2026), next to a range of "20% to 43%". It's a global figure, not a UK one, and MailerLite itself says that Apple Mail Privacy Protection marks emails sent to Apple Mail as opened, so open and click-to-open rates come out higher than the real ones. The GetResponse report makes the same admission about its own growth in opens.
How much Apple Mail Privacy Protection weighs
Mail Privacy Protection is the Apple feature that, as the official documentation explains, downloads remote content in the background even when the user doesn't interact with the message. The tracking pixel loads even if nobody opened the email, and the platform records an open.
According to Litmus's email client market share report, in July 2026 Apple Mail accounted for 62.26% of measured opens, against 27.03% for Gmail and 5.83% for Outlook; Litmus estimates that MPP affects 55-60% of all opens. It's a global sample, and there's no verifiable UK figure. That's why the open rate says little about real interest: two lists with the same share of Apple users will have open rates inflated in a similar way, two lists with a different mix won't.
A practical case: a B2B list made up mostly of company addresses on Outlook will show a lower open rate than a consumer list full of iPhones, even if the first one clicks more. Before comparing yourself with a benchmark, look at the breakdown by client in your platform's report.
Clicks and CTOR: the numbers that hold up better
The click-through rate (CTR) is the percentage of recipients who click at least one link; the CTOR is the percentage of clicks among those who opened. Clicks aren't distorted by Apple's preloading, so this is the metric to look at first. The CTOR is still affected by opens in the denominator.
| Metric | Great Britain (GetResponse, 2023) | Global average (GetResponse, 2023) | UK (DMA, 2024) | World (Mailchimp, end of 2023) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Click rate | 2.74% | 3.25% | 2.3% (unique clicks) | 2.62% |
| CTOR | 6.86% | 8.62% | n/a | n/a |
| Unsubscribes | 0.15% | 0.15% | n/a | 0.22% |
The two UK sources point the same way: UK recipients click less than the global average. GetResponse puts Great Britain at 2.74% against 3.25%, with a CTOR of 6.86% against 8.62%, and the DMA's unique click rate of 2.3% is in the same range. So UK lists open at or above the global average and click below it, which suggests the problem in UK emails sits more in the content and its relevance than in the subject line. The check to run on the landing page is the same one we describe when a website isn't converting, and for the button there are the call to action examples we've collected. If the drop comes from newsletters with nothing to say, the fix is a content marketing plan that gives the sends a calendar too.
Automations against campaigns: the figure worth looking at
One figure that comes up on Google UK's first page for "email marketing statistics" (the AI Overview quoted it on 10 October 2026) isn't about opens at all: it's the gap between automated emails (welcome, abandoned basket, win-back) and campaigns sent to the whole list. Omnisend's benchmark, covering over 20 billion campaign emails and 470 million automated sends from more than 27,000 e-commerce brands in 2025, is clear-cut.
| Type of email | Open rate | Click rate | Conversion | Revenue per email sent |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Campaigns | 30.41% | 0.74% | 0.08% | $0.155 |
| Automations | 30.21% | 4.66% | 1.49% | $3.41 |
The open rate is almost identical, the rest isn't: automations convert 18 times more and earn 22 times more per email sent. The sample is international online shops, and the absolute dollar values shouldn't be carried over to a UK e-commerce site. The ratio between the two types of send, on the other hand, has an explanation that holds anywhere: an automation starts from a specific action, such as a visit to a product page brought in by e-commerce SEO, while a campaign arrives when the sender decides. It's the same principle as remarketing, applied to the inbox.
Delivery: how many emails actually reach the inbox
Delivery and inbox placement are two different measures. The delivery rate counts emails accepted by the recipient's server; inbox placement counts those that land in the inbox rather than in spam. The DMA's 98% is a delivery rate. The inbox figure comes from Validity's 2025 Benchmark Report, which measures with test addresses across hundreds of providers (2024 data).
| Area or provider | Inbox | Spam | Missing |
|---|---|---|---|
| Global average | 83.5% | 6.7% | 9.8% |
| United Kingdom | 87.8% | 3.6% | 8.6% |
| Europe | 89.1% | 4.9% | 6.0% |
| North America | 85.0% | 5.7% | 9.4% |
| Gmail | 87.2% | 6.8% | 6.0% |
| Yahoo/AOL | 86.0% | 4.8% | 9.2% |
| Apple | 76.3% | 14.3% | 9.4% |
| Microsoft | 75.6% | 14.6% | 9.8% |
In the UK, one email in eight doesn't reach the inbox, slightly worse than the European average and well behind Germany (94.5%) and France (91.4%). Most of the UK gap is mail that goes missing rather than to spam: 8.6% against 6% in Europe. On Microsoft and Apple mailboxes the share outside the inbox rises to one in four: for anyone writing to companies on Outlook, that's the figure to keep in view.
The Gmail, Yahoo and Microsoft rules
Since February 2024 Google treats anyone sending about 5,000 or more messages in 24 hours to personal Gmail accounts as a bulk sender. They must authenticate the domain with SPF, DKIM and DMARC, offer one-click unsubscribe (the RFC 8058 standard) in promotional emails and keep the spam complaint rate below 0.1%, never reaching 0.3%. Since November 2025 Google has tightened enforcement, with temporary and permanent rejections of non-compliant messages. Yahoo asks for the same, with unsubscribes to be honoured within two days. Microsoft applies similar requirements to anyone sending more than 5,000 messages to Outlook.com and Hotmail from the same domain.
To see where UK companies stand, on 10 October 2026 we checked the DNS records of 50 large UK companies and organisations: all 50 publish a DMARC record, 34 with the strictest policy (p=reject), 7 still on monitoring only. The breakdown by sector is in our guide on how to do email marketing.
Email marketing ROI: where 36, 38 and 42 come from
The return on investment quoted for email marketing in the UK ranges from 36 to 42 pounds per pound spent, usually without a source. On 10 October 2026 Google UK's AI Overview for "email marketing statistics" gave "$36 to $40 for every $1 spent". There are three origins, all based on surveys in which marketers state an estimate.
- £42 per pound: DMA UK, Marketer Email Tracker 2019, 197 British marketers surveyed in January 2019. About £36 in B2B and £48 in B2C.
- 38 to 1: Litmus, press release of 11 October 2018, about 400 marketers worldwide.
- $36: in the Litmus 2025 survey of about 500 professionals it isn't an average but a boundary. 35% report a return between $10 and $36, 30% between $36 and $50, 5% above $50.
Only the DMA figure comes from UK marketers, and it dates from 2019, like the more recent of the two averages. Your newsletter's ROI is worked out on the margin attributed to email in Google Analytics divided by the real costs, using the method in our guide to marketing ROI.
The 2026 change that will affect the statistics: tracking pixels and PECR
In April 2026 the ICO published its final guidance on storage and access technologies, the rules once known as the cookie rules. A tracking pixel is the invisible image platforms use to record opens. The guidance uses email marketing as one of its examples: an organisation that puts a pixel in its emails to record the time, location and operating system of the device used to read them. Marketing emails as such fall under regulation 22 of PECR, but where the pixel stores or reads information on the recipient's device, regulation 6 applies, and regulation 6 requires consent unless an exception covers the purpose.
The exception that could apply is the new one for statistical purposes, added by the Data (Use and Access) Act 2025 and in force since February 2026. According to the ICO page on the exceptions, it covers storage or access whose sole purpose is to collect statistics on how a service is used in order to improve it, and only if people get a simple way to object that costs them nothing. The ICO doesn't say whether email open tracking qualifies, and a pixel that records who opened what, to trigger follow-ups or score leads, has more than one purpose.
Unlike in Italy, where the data protection authority issued guidelines specifically on email pixels in April 2026 with a six-month deadline, the UK has no dedicated rule and no date. The direction is the same, though. Individual open tracking is the part most exposed to a consent requirement, while aggregate statistics have the better case for the exception. Automations that fire on "opened, didn't click" are worth reviewing now, and UK benchmarks in future editions may not be comparable with today's. One more reason to move reporting to clicks and conversions.
How to use these numbers on your account
Benchmarks tell you whether you're badly off course, not what your targets should be. The useful comparison is with your own figures from six months ago, on the same list and the same type of send. Three practical checks:
- Separate newsletters, promotional campaigns and automations in the report: with the Omnisend figures in mind, a single average hides almost everything.
- Read CTR and CTOR before the open rate, and check whether your platform can filter out machine opens: Mailchimp, for example, recommends excluding Apple MPP and other bot activity from reports.
- Bring email into Analytics with consistent UTM parameters, so the revenue attributed to it can be compared with other channels, as we do in the digital marketing statistics for the UK market.
If email is there to warm up the contacts collected by your website and campaigns, work on the sequences is part of our lead generation service: we start from click data by segment, not from open rates.
Email marketing statistics: frequently asked questions
It depends on the source: 35.9% in 2024 according to the DMA's Email Benchmarking Report, 39.98% for Great Britain according to GetResponse on 2023 data. Both include the automatic opens generated by Apple Mail Privacy Protection, and they measure different senders, so the two numbers can't be compared directly.
It depends on the sector, but as a reference GetResponse measures an average CTR of 2.74% and a CTOR of 6.86% in Great Britain (2023 data), and the DMA a unique click rate of 2.3% in the UK in 2024. A figure consistently below these levels points to a problem with content or segmentation.
No, not as a measure of interest. Apple Mail downloads email images automatically and records opens that never happened: according to Litmus, Apple Mail accounted for 62.26% of measured opens in July 2026. Clicks and conversions are more solid metrics.
There's no recent measured UK average. The figures usually quoted (42 pounds per pound, 38 to 1, 36 dollars) come from British and international surveys from 2018 to 2025 in which marketers state an estimate; the UK one, from the DMA, dates from 2019. ROI should be worked out on the margins and costs of your own business.
According to Validity, in 2024 87.8% of emails in the UK reached the inbox, 3.6% went to spam and 8.6% went missing. In Europe the inbox figure was 89.1%. On Microsoft and Apple mailboxes inbox placement drops below 77%.
Possibly. The ICO's April 2026 guidance says that where a tracking pixel in an email stores or reads information on the recipient's device, PECR regulation 6 applies, which requires consent unless an exception applies. The new statistical purposes exception covers only aggregate use to improve a service, with a no-cost way to object. Tracking individual opens is the part most likely to need consent.
The missing benchmark is the one by email client
Every report quoted here publishes an average open rate, and none publishes it split by email client. Yet that's the only fair way to compare two lists: a list where Apple Mail accounts for 70% and one where it accounts for 20% won't have the same open rate even if the people on them behave the same way. If your platform gives you the breakdown by client, calculate opens only on the clients that don't preload images: it's a smaller number, but it's the only open rate that still measures something in 2026. With the ICO's reading of PECR on pixels, it's also a number you can keep calculating in aggregate, without following each recipient.
