Email marketing is the act of sending targeted, permission-based emails to a list of subscribers with the goal of building relationships, selling goods or services, and getting people to take action. It is one of the oldest types of online marketing and, according to the numbers, one of the best.
An email list is something you own, unlike social media, where you rent an audience on someone else’s platform and have to deal with algorithm changes every night. No platform can take it away from you. There is no algorithm that decides if your message gets to your subscriber. You can get someone’s attention right away if they give you their email address and agree to receive messages from you. This directness is why email still has the best return on investment of any digital channel.
There are different types of email marketing campaigns. Promotional emails send out time-sensitive deals, discounts, or new product launches. Newsletters give people consistent value, like industry news, tips, and curated content, that keeps them interested between purchases. User actions like order confirmations, shipping updates, and password resets cause transactional emails to be sent. These emails have the highest open rates of any type. Shipping confirmations have an average open rate of almost 63%. Then there are automated sequences, like welcome series, abandoned cart flows, and re-engagement campaigns. These run on their own and get more valuable over time as they continuously engage customers, improve targeting, and increase conversion rates based on user behavior and preferences.
The channel is at the center of the modern marketing funnel because it works for all four stages: awareness, consideration, conversion, and retention. A well-built email program is not a way to send out messages to many people at once. It is a machine that makes relationships.
How much do email marketers make in the business?
Email marketing has grown from a job for one person to a complex field with many career paths, and the pay reflects that growth. As of early 2026, this is what the data shows.
In the United States, someone with fewer than two years of experience can expect to make between $45,000 and $59,000 a year at the entry level. An email marketer with less than a year of experience can make $59,000, while one with more than 15 years of experience can earn $82,000. Coursera
For specialists who have been in the field for three to five years and have worked on campaigns, segmentation, and automation, the range is much wider. In the United States, the average salary for an email marketing specialist is $76,361 per year. The pay range for most people is between $58,333 at the 25th percentile and $100,673 at the 75th percentile, with the highest earners making up to $128,463. Glassdoor managers make a lot more. The average salary for an email marketing manager is $102,450 a year. The range is usually between $79,415 and $133,442 a year. The industry that pays the most is information technology, with a median salary of $161,496. Glassdoor
Industry is also important. An email marketer who works in education can make $75,000 a year, while one who works in information technology can make $68,000. Coursera: E-commerce and retail jobs tend to pay more than average because email gives those businesses a direct way to track sales.
The numbers are just as convincing for people who want to work as a freelancer or at an agency in email marketing. Email strategists who are adept at copywriting and automation charge between $75 and $150 per hour on sites like Upwork and Toptal. Experienced professionals can make six figures a year by building businesses that charge clients on a retainer basis.
Campaign execution is not the only skill that will pay well in 2026. They are tools for automating marketing (like Klaviyo, HubSpot, and ActiveCampaign), A/B testing, audience segmentation, managing deliverability, and analyzing data. The more you can show how email performance affects sales, the more power you have in any salary negotiation.
How to Really Do Email Marketing
You must know how to use email well and how powerful it is. Here is a useful, step-by-step plan.
Step 1: Make a list of people who have given you permission. This can’t be changed. Don’t ever buy a list. Don’t ever scrape addresses. You need to have gotten permission from each contact to send them emails. Give people a reason to sign up by giving them free guides, templates, discount codes, and webinars. Use double opt-in when you can. This means that people who sign up have to confirm their address. This adds an extra step to the process, but it makes the list much better and cuts down on spam complaints later.
Step 2: Pick the best email service provider (ESP). Different platforms, like Mailchimp, Klaviyo, ActiveCampaign, ConvertKit, and HubSpot, are good for different things. Klaviyo is excellent for e-commerce brands because it works so well with Shopify. ConvertKit is usually a good choice for content creators and coaches. Many B2B companies use HubSpot or ActiveCampaign to connect their CRMs. Your ESP is the foundation of your business. Don’t just pick one based on price.
Step 3: Right away, divide your audience into groups. Everyone on your list doesn’t want the same thing. You can group your subscribers by how they joined your list, what they bought, what content they interacted with, and where they are in the buying process. Segmented campaigns always do better than broadcast blasts. A person who clicked on a blog post about prices is in a very different frame of mind than someone who just downloaded a beginner’s guide.
Step 4: Write subject lines that make people want to open them. The only things that can stop someone from deleting your email are the subject line and the preview text. Make sure your subject lines are less than 50 characters long, are specific instead of clever, and test at least two different versions of each campaign. Stay away from spammy words like “free,” “guaranteed,” and “urgent,” as well as phrases that are all in capital letters. Adding the subscriber’s first name to the email can increase open rates by as much as 26%.
Step 5: Give real value in the body. There should be a “so what?” test for every email. What does the reader get out of the email? Maintain a friendly tone, keep paragraphs concise, include a single clear call to action, and ensure the email is visually appealing on mobile devices, as nearly half of all email opens occur on phones.
Step 6: Set up sequences for automation. The most important automation you will ever make is your welcome series. The first 48 to 72 hours after someone signs up are when they are most active. Use that time to tell people about your brand, keep the promise that made them sign up, and let them know what to expect from future communications. In addition to the welcome series, create sequences for abandoned carts, follow-ups after a purchase, and campaigns to get inactive subscribers to start using your service again.
Step 7: Watch, test, and make changes. Email marketing requires constant monitoring and adjustments. Look at the performance metrics after each campaign. Try out different subject lines, send times, content formats, and calls to action (CTAs) in A/B tests. The effect of small, steady improvements over months is amazing.
What is the best open rate for email marketing?
The open rate is the percentage of emails that were opened by the people who got them. In the past, the open rate was the most important measure of success in email marketing. However, since Apple added Mail Privacy Protection (MPP) in 2021, which automatically loads email content and records opens even if the user never reads the message, it has become less reliable.
With that in mind, here are the benchmarks as they stand. In 2025, the average email open rate was 43.46%, which is a small rise from the 42.35% average in 2024. However, this number is higher than it should be because of Apple MPP, which inflates open rates by automatically registering opens for users who have opted into privacy features, leading to misleading statistics. Most deliverability experts say that a real open rate of 20% to 30% is a good goal for practical benchmarking. Anything above 30% is considered strong in most industries.
A good open rate for newsletters is often said to be between 40% and 50%. However, a 20% open rate can also be considered decent. What is “good” really depends on your industry.
Omnisend
Click-to-open rate (CTOR) has become a more important engagement signal because open rates are no longer as reliable. In 2025, the average click-to-open rate for emails was 6.81%, which is higher than the 5.63% average for 2024. Most ESPs (Email Service Providers) think that a CTR (click-through rate) of more than 20% is good for MailerLite. This number shows if your email’s content was interesting enough to act on, which is the most important thing to know.
What is the best spam rate for email marketing?
The spam complaint rate is the number of people who mark your email as spam. A high spam rate is probably the most important deliverability metric you manage. It hurts your sender reputation with inbox providers and can even get your emails blocked completely.
It’s best to stay below 0.1%, which means one complaint for every 1,000 emails. If you go above 0.3%, you could face serious consequences like having your account suspended or blacklisted. As of 2024, Google and Yahoo both enforce a 0.3% limit for bulk email senders. Microsoft Outlook did the same thing on May 5, 2025. Warmforge: Most people in the industry think that the 0.3% threshold is too high. You should try to get your spam complaint rate down to 0.02% or lower. Your email service provider may get angry if your rate goes up to 0.1%. Mailgun: The 2024 International Email Benchmark report says that the global average rate of spam complaints is only 0.01% of all accepted emails. The standard for elite senders is “super.”
The best ways to keep your spam rate close to zero are to only email people who have clearly opted in, never use purchased lists, make your unsubscribe link easy to find and use (an unsubscribe is much less damaging than a spam report), clean out inactive subscribers from your list regularly, and make sure your sender name is easy to remember so subscribers know who you are.
The Bottom Line
Email marketing is not a thing of the past in 2026. Email marketing offers the highest return on investment (ROI) in digital marketing, provides the most direct means of reaching your audience, and ranks among the highest-paying jobs in the marketing field. However, the gap between effective and ineffective email marketing has widened significantly. Email providers are stricter, subscribers are more picky, and algorithms that used to let bad campaigns go now punish them quickly.
The fundamentals remain unchanged: create a clean list, obtain permission, segment your list into groups, write in a conversational tone, conduct thorough testing, and monitor your metrics closely. If you get those right, email will always be your best way to make money, no matter what else changes.
