2022 Email Benchmarks, Trends & Geeky Behaviors

Check out the top 2022 email benchmarks in this new, comprehensive report

Email is hard. And effective. And fun! Basically, email rules. 👑 Our new report, Email in 2022, includes almost 50 pages all about why email rules – it turns out we had a lot to say. The report is broken out into three detailed areas for you: 

• Part I: Email Industry Trends
• Part II: How Professionals View Email
• Part III: Email Benchmark Data

Read on for a quick summary and sneak peek of each section below, or skip to the good part and download the full report for all the best 2022 email benchmarks.

Email industry trends – from design fads to privacy changes to burnout 

Email is ever-changing, and 2021 proved no different. Not to mention, competition in the inbox is fiercer than ever, so staying on top of the latest email happenings is a must. Throughout the first section of Email in 2022, you can dive into all of the top trends – from design fads to privacy shake-ups, and everything in between.

TL;DR: Engagement is still the name of the game.

There’s been an ongoing shift to cater to all subscribers, instead of just the majority. This means more accessible email, dark mode friendly designs, secure sending, honoring everyone’s right to privacy, and more. Failing to adhere to new practices can damage brand trust and reputation – and risk losing your valuable subscribers. 

Litmus Halloween email showing light vs. dark mode

Overall, more sophisticated forms of email content are really gaining traction, which requires you to be on your A-game to stay relevant. But the payoff is real! More personalized messaging means more engagement – which also means better deliverability, more conversions, and a stronger community for your brand. 

And while we love a good trend, we want to acknowledge that new email adaptations also come with challenges in rendering, accessibility, staying on brand, scaling your email programs… the list goes on. But a well planned QA system in a marketer’s workflow can enable easier day-to-day email production to make optimizing your program simple. There’s more on how to accomplish that in the report – but for a quick, shameless plug – Taxi for Email makes it a breeze to keep your emails in top shape. 

How professionals view email – feedback from over 2,000 email marketers 

This year’s global survey brought in responses from 2,000 marketing leaders and 224 email practitioners (aka email geeks 🤓) to get their perspectives on how their businesses, budgets, and priorities have changed in the last year. As the world continues to heal from the effects of two challenging pandemic-heavy years, leaders and practitioners are facing new challenges with a lot of optimism. And we love to see it!

Business recovery garnered real momentum in 2021, with the majority of marketing leaders reporting their organization has returned to pre-Covid level budgets. But spending priorities have shifted, and it’s clear marketing leaders are putting a lot of value and resources into investing in themselves by building out content and branding. 

At the same time, the marketing landscape is evolving at a rapid pace. And while that poses a lot of opportunity for brands, it also comes with a fair amount of current and impending challenges. Privacy-related issues are clearly taking center stage, and with the jump to a cookieless digital landscape scheduled now for 2023, pressure to shore up marketing processes and data strategies is what’s keeping leaders up at night most. 74% of marketing leaders say they’re “concerned” with privacy changes, and many are taking a proactive approach – 82% of leaders are preparing now for what’s to come, and 72% of email practitioners say they’re concerned with how privacy changes will affect their ability to perform.

The full Email in 2022 report contains tons of juicy nuggets like this, along with the press release. Don’t miss out if you want the best 2022 email benchmarks! This year’s survey focused on six main areas:

• Business performance and budget
• Workload and team changes
• Privacy
• Email marketing’s value and investment
• Email production
• Future of work

Email benchmark data – how email volumes & engagement rates are faring

Do you know how your emails are performing vs. other senders globally? In the third and final section of this year’s report, we examine 136 billion engagements across 466 billion emails and 421 million unique permissioned recipients in the period of Q420-Q321. Yep – that’s a lot of data. 🤯

All of this awesome data was derived from the world’s largest panel of permissioned email recipients with over 850,000 permissioned panelists across 54 global mailbox providers seeing 4.5 billion inbox interactions over the period 4Q20-3Q21. 

So as you look to establish 2022 email benchmarks for your own program, check out some of the past month-to-month trends in our report for:

• Delivery rates
• Inboxing rates 
• Hard bounce rates
• Spam trap hit rates for: typo traps, parked traps, recycled traps & pristine traps
• Unique open rates (we know – open rates are dead though 💀)
• Unique click rates
• Click-to-open rates
• Daily inbox volume/panelist 
• Weekly brand/contact cadence
• And much, much more!

As the world’s highest volume email sender with the most advanced analytics footprint, SparkPost is proud to have the largest data network of any delivery analytics provider, not just in terms of overall data points, but in the depth and diversity of the sources we pull from. The SparkPost data network currently consists of eight sources. 

Don’t sleep on these 2022 email benchmarks

All in all, the SparkPost team poured a lot of love, effort, and knowledge into this Email in 2022 report to give you the best trends, behaviors, and benchmarks driving email forward right now. 

And while I’m an avid reader, I totally get that a 49-page report can be a little intimidating. So if you’d prefer to talk through these trends, you can listen to our expert panel discuss the findings. Watch the Email in 2022 webinar on-demand now! You’ll hear a summary of each section covering all of the 2022 email benchmarks and more.

~Koertni Adams
Sr. Content Marketing Manager, SparkPost