Email marketing continues to be a powerful channel, but the bar is getting higher. This is demonstrated by the latest edition of the GDMA International Email Benchmark 2025, which analyzed email campaign performance worldwide. Despite a stable trend in Acceptance Rate (98.7%) and Unique Open Rate (32.5% OR) since 2022, engagement remains the key: recipients still open emails but are clicking less.
Globally, the Click to Open Rate (CTO) dropped by 1.2 percentage points to 7.6% in 2024, and the Click Through Rate (CTR) fell by 0.7 percentage points to 2.9%. It’s notable that click rates in retail in particular, are under pressure. Since 2022, retail campaigns globally have seen a 2.8 percentage point decline in CTO (now 6.3%), and a 1.4 percentage point decline in CTR (now 2.3%). Other major sectors show stable to strong performance.
Retail focuses on volume, but the challenge is in refinement
The retail sector – a combination of e-commerce and physical shops – accounts for 81% of all emails sent globally in 2024. The average number of campaigns per retailer is 810 worldwide, compared to 163 in other sectors.
This massive reach has its downside: often generic, promotion-driven retail campaigns lead to saturation and declining engagement. And that’s precisely where the opportunity for improvement lies—email remains effective, however, recipients expect increased relevance.
Small is the new big: segmentation pays off
Benchmark insights on campaign volume also highlight the importance of relevance and personalization. While the largest batches on global level (>250,000 emails) achieve an OR of 26.0%, CTO of 2.9%, and a CTR of just 0.8%, smaller campaigns (<5,000 emails) achieve an OR of 37.6%, CTO of 10.2%, and a CTR of 4.4%.
Large, generic campaigns are also increasingly less appreciated, while smaller, usually better-segmented campaigns generate more impact. Compared to 2023, results for large batches have declined significantly: whereas the large batches had a CTO of 4.3% in 2023, but this dropped to 2.9% in 2024 (compared to an average of 7.6%), and CTR dropped from 1.2% to 0.8% (compared to an average of 2.9%).
Remarkably, large bulk campaigns have a lower Unsubscribe Rate worldwide (0.06% vs. 0.12% average), but this points more to lack of interest than to loyalty or engagement. Recipients simply ignore emails, as seen in the low interaction in other metrics.
About the GDMA International Email Benchmark 2025
The benchmark is based on anonymized campaign data (2021-2024) from 20 ESPs (16 in 2025): Doppler, Flexmail, CaRe-Mail, Hellodialog, ICOMM mkt, MailBlaze, Mailcampaigns, Maileon, Mailkit, SAP/Emarsys, Marigold, Selzy, Spotler (including Tripolis), Reachstack, Tekside.io, and TouchBase Pro. The benchmark includes 11.4 million email campaigns (2021–2023: 5.2 million) and 521 billion emails sent (2021–2023: 203 billion). The 2025 edition specifies 61 countries (2024: 31 countries) across Europe, North America, Central America, South America, APAC, Africa, and the Middle East.
The GDMA International Email Benchmark is an independent initiative by the Global Data & Marketing Alliance (GDMA) and the Dutch Data Driven Marketing Association (DDMA). For additional information or if you would like to participate in a future edition, please contact Robin de Wouters (GDMA) at rdewouters@fedma.org or Nanda Appelman (DDMA) at nandaappelman@ddma.nl.
