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2024 State of Email Newsletters by beehiiv
The Latest beehiiv Data, Trends & Innovations Shaping the Newsletter Industry
Tyler Denk, TG & EJ White
January 8th, 2024
It’s an incredible time for email newsletters.
Every day, over 4 billion humans open up their email inboxes to hear from their friends, brands, and creators they love the most.
And, while social media receives all the praise for being the number one medium to reach people, email continues to dominate.
With more than 50% of the global population checking their inboxes daily (and with those numbers projected to increase), you have to ask yourself…
What is an email newsletter worth?
From the reader’s perspective, it offers a simple way to hear from the creators/brands you love.
Unlike social media or ads, email isn’t a form of interruption marketing.
Readers opt-in to hear on specific topics, ensuring their preferences are met. The moment the content doesn’t meet their needs, they can unsubscribe.
Newsletters give readers complete control.
For brands, it’s an amazing opportunity to double down on growth.
For creators, it provides a unique opportunity to completely own their audiences and build new income streams.
Advancements in the newsletter industry have made it easier than ever to turn your passion into a paycheck.
Between 2021 and 2022, 402 million emails were sent using beehiiv.
In 2023, the number catapulted to 4.5 billion emails.
Email newsletters can help you:
Unlock new audiences
Skyrocket your earnings
Build a loyal following
Create a unique 1:1 reader connection
In this beehiiv state of newsletters report, we cover the latest insights in the email newsletter industry to put you in the best position to succeed this year.
We’ve sent and seen a lot of newsletters.
We aim to pass on our insights and trends, empowering you to build an ironclad newsletter business.
Plus, you’ll get the top insights from newsletter experts and their advice on what’s to come in 2024.
Let’s dive in!
Table of Contents
In 2021, beehiiv was created by a few early employees at Morning Brew: Tyler Denk, Benjamin Hargett, and Jacob Hurd. Read the full story here.
Here at beehiiv, we’re passionate about email newsletters and helping creators and brands create, grow, and easily monetize their newsletters – This is also the reason we wanted to share our insights on the newsletter space for 2024.
Here’s How We Pulled the Data
This report is based on beehiiv’s first-party data gathered throughout 2023.
During this period, we scrutinized millions of data points, including:
In the report, we included rich data on email open rates, and click rates.
Keep reading to gain a data-driven roadmap for your email newsletter in 2024 and beyond to improve your newsletter strategy.
The Effectiveness of Email Newsletters: Statistics & Benchmarks
In 2023, we've seen a 700+% increase in newsletters on beehiiv year-over-year.
While a large factor in that growth is attributed to beehiiv’s success as a platform, the newsletter industry continues to expand each year.
Here, we’ve gathered core email newsletter engagement metrics from across all industries. You can see how your average email open rates, click-throughs, unsubscribes, spam complaint rates, and deliverability compare against other newsletters.
Newsletter Engagement in 2023: Opens & Clicks
The overall open rates are great, at 38.7%. Compared to 2022, average open rates were 42.9%, down nearly 4% on average.
Our analysis also reveals that within industry benchmarks, alternative emailing platforms exhibit an average open rate ranging between 19% to 23%.
While 2022 saw the seasoned players making their mark in the newsletter realm, 2023 pivoted towards inviting a wider audience as more individuals took the plunge into newsletter creation.
So, what does this mean exactly?
Lower open rates may be a sign of the increased competition in readers’ inboxes.
More people are starting newsletters, which means you need to focus on standing out by providing more value with your newsletter within a specific niche.
Keep in mind that open rates used to be the top engagement metric, but the importance of open rates is shrinking. This is due to various factors like Apple’s privacy measures skewing open data and the importance of higher-value engagement metrics like clicks.
In 2022, average click-through rates were 1.79%. In 2023, they went up to 1.85%.
As more newsletters are popping up every day, you need to ensure you’re making yours as relevant and engaging as possible – especially when it comes to driving clicks.
The increase in CTRs from 2022 to 2023, shows how readers love to engage with content when they find it relatable even amidst the volume of emails in their inboxes every day.
This could be about linking to external news sources, internal links to related newsletter posts, or sponsored ad links to products and services.
Key takeaways:
Drill down to serve a specific niche and stand out by offering better niche content.
Incorporate multiple Call-to-Action (CTAs) at various points within an email.
Core Engagement Stats by Industry
Here, we’ve gathered email newsletter benchmarks broken down by industry. You can see how your average email opens, click-throughs and spam complaint rates compare against other newsletters in your industry.
To ensure the accuracy of the industry data, we made sure to only include industries with 100+ newsletters.
Venture Capital, Writing, and Community Are the Most Engaged Industries
Email newsletters continue to be a crucial channel to reach any industry. And, for readers looking to engage with interesting content, newsletters are proven to be an important content type as shown through high engagement levels.
As a reminder, open rate is the percentage of subscribers you sent a newsletter to who opened it. If you sent it to 10,000 people and 5,000 people opened the newsletter, that’s a 50% open rate.
In the lead for opens, we’ve got Venture Capital (50.4%), Sports (47.5%), and food & drink (45.3%).
The timeliness of updates, the emotional connections, and the niched, engaged communities within these sectors contribute to their significantly higher engagement rates.
They all observed high open rates compared to the average open rate across all industries of 38.7%.
When To Send: Most Engaging Times to Send Your Newsletter
There’s a science to newsletter timing.
If you want your readers to engage with your newsletter, you need to know the days and times they’re opening up their email inboxes.
What Days of the Week Have the Highest Engagement Rates?
Sunday, Monday Happy Days
The days with the highest open rates and click-through rates are Sunday and Monday.
On Sunday, newsletter readers are most engaged. It has the highest open rates with 39.3% (and click-through rates of 1.7%).
Monday is super close behind with nearly identical open rates of 39.3%. Monday’s click-through rates are slightly lower at 1.6%.
The lowest day for a newsletter is Saturday with 36.5% open rates and 1.4% click-through rates.
What Times of the Day Have the Highest Engagement Rates?
Readers Want an Early Lunch
The times of day for the best engagement are right before lunch at 10 am GMT, with average open rates of 44.5%, and 11 am GMT, with open rates of 42.4%.
Lunchtime (12 pm GMT) has a slight drop at 38.1% but it is still one of the most engaged times to send.
Engagement climbs right after lunch again at 1 pm with open rates of 41.5% and at 2 pm GMT, open rates are 41.2%.
The verdict?
Send your newsletter around lunchtime (between 10 am and 2 pm GMT). The second best time to send is the evening, and the worst time to send is the early morning.
Just remember though, that the “best” days of the week and times of day aren’t set in stone. These numbers fluctuate from year to year (as people figure out when the best times to send are). As more people pick those “best” times, they become saturated. The best way to combat this is to A/B test the best times with your audience. We’ve found that consistency in sending overtime helps as well. Your audience will become accustomed to your sending schedule.
How Often Are Creators Sending Newsletters?
When reviewing the total active users on beehiiv, we investigated the number of users sending newsletters on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis. Here’s what we found:
Daily vs. Weekly vs. Monthly
The reality is that newsletters take plenty of work to create. But, by relying on templates, systematized newsletter creation processes, and sticking to a schedule, anything is possible.
And, only a small percentage of newsletter creators (4.9%) send a daily publication. Daily newsletters pose a challenge, but their frequent send-outs (5 to 7 times more than weekly emails) generate increased feedback and engagement. This higher interaction rate boosts the collection of valuable insights, driving substantial growth opportunities.
With a daily newsletter, you can build a loyal audience that you leverage to earn a full-time income (and beyond) — as is the case with Saeed Ezzati, Rowan Cheung, and Andrew Grillo.
But, if you can’t send a daily newsletter, hitting “send” once a week or even once a month is still a powerful way to offer your audience value and build an engaged following, like Jack Appleby, Roland Frasier, and Eli Weiss have done.
Email Automation Statistics
Here, we’ve gathered email newsletter stats comparing regular email newsletter campaigns with automated, trigger-based emails.
In terms of open rates, regular newsletter sends took the lead with 38.7% open rates compared to automated messages slightly lower at 36.1%.
**It is important to note that many users leverage automations for list cleaning and automating unengaged subscribers.
However, looking at click-through rates, automated messages were more than 3 times higher (5.5%) than newsletter campaigns (1.5%).
This shows that balancing regular newsletters with automated emails is key to delivering a well-rounded user experience to your subscribers.
The best-performing email is still the Welcome Email with an average open rate of 47.0%. This is an automated email you can set up to be sent to new subscribers right after they subscribe. Our favorite Welcome email this year goes to Smart Nonsense. To see why, subscribe here and enjoy.
This is a critical email you should use to:
Reiterate the value your readers will get from your newsletter.
Set expectations on how often they will receive a newsletter from you.
Link out to your most popular newsletter posts to get subscribers engaged right away.
Automation is a critical part of a successful email newsletter strategy, yet only 10.1% of beehiiv users are leveraging automation (excluding welcome emails). Additionally, among all publications, 38.8% have sent a welcome email.
Here’s why automations should be a part of your emailing strategy:
Automated journeys work around the clock, optimizing your email strategy.
They deliver personalized content when it matters most to individual subscribers.
Here, we’ve gathered open rate statistics to analyze the impact on your open rates based on the number of characters in your subject line.
Less is more.
The more characters you add to your subject line, the lower the open rate. Stick to subject lines with under 20 characters as much as you can.
Longer subject lines often struggle to grab attention, especially since many individuals check emails on mobile devices, leading to incomplete visibility.
Additionally, the average character count in a newsletter is 2,115. This may sound like a lot, but it isn’t. This works out to about 360 words, give or take which is much smaller than the average blog post.
Monetization: “Boosting” Your Income on Autopilot
Here we’ve analyzed how much creators are earning by leveraging beehiiv’s “Boosts” feature. beehiiv Boosts is a paid recommendation feature that allows you to promote other newsletters to your subscribers. You'll get paid if they subscribe to one of your recommended “Boosted” newsletters.
beehiiv Boosts has paid out a total of $272,430 to creators.
The average cost per subscriber is $2.37.
Brands are willing to spend $2.37 to acquire a single subscriber through your newsletter. In this case, if you boost 1,000 subscribers to another newsletter each month, you’ll earn $2,370 extra on average – automatically. It’s one of the easiest ways to start earning from your newsletter on autopilot with the simple click of a button.
In 2023, we uncovered several key findings about the state of newsletters, trends, and the future of the industry. In our research, we’ve unlocked insights into how creators and business owners are using email newsletters, the core challenges they face today, and how they’re optimizing them moving forward into 2024.
Don’t sleep on Personalization
As newsletters become mainstream, to reach subscribers better, newsletter operators need to personalize their content, segment their audiences, and leverage automations and consistent content publishing.
Creators and business owners need to shift from third-party to first-party cookies.
As third-party cookies fade out in 2024, ad platforms also shift to first-party models. This hits large publishers using third-party data. But to adapt, newsletters must gather first and zero-party data for better audience targeting.
AI presents both an opportunity and a challenge for creators.
The 2023 explosion in Artificial Intelligence (AI) offers creators a new form of leverage to optimize their content and streamline their operations. But, an acceleration in the volume of new content being produced by AI means creators need to double down on the quality and uniqueness of their own content to stand out in the inbox.
Now let’s unpack each of these trends.
In 2024, personalization and automation are critical to reaching your audience. As email newsletters are advancing in popularity, so is the competitive landscape.
The result? More emails are flooding readers’ inboxes.
One of the most effective ways to stand out is through personalization.
Personalization goes far beyond inputting a single element like your subscriber’s name in your newsletters.
True personalization is the practice of creating individualized user experiences with your newsletter.
This is done in a variety of ways, with the three key tactics being segmentation and automation:
Segmenting your subscribers with key data points is the path to delivering the best possible subscriber experience.
Personalization and automations allow you to deliver the right message to the right subscriber at the right time.
Capturing data via custom forms & surveys allows you to know how to segment and provide curated personalized information.
Top Data Points to Personalize Emails
Name
Company Name
Other profile data like gender or race
Purchasers and non-purchasers
Opened or clicked an email recently
Location
Expressed preferences or interests
Paid subscribers vs. unpaid subscribers
Click on ads vs those who haven’t clicked on ads
Purchased a specific product or service
Read emails with mobile, tablet, or desktop
Key Action Points
Here’s how you can do this on a practical level:
Use robust email newsletter software that offers segmentation
Create sign-up forms for your initial subscribers to capture unique data - what they do, where are they from, etc
Keep using forms, surveys, and polls to better understand your audience
To cater to your audience coming from different sources, segment your audience using dynamic segmentation
Set up automated emails that are triggered based on your subscribers’ behaviors
With beehiiv 3D analytics, you get to do deep-dives into key subscriber details
The key to success with email newsletters isn’t to reach as many people as possible. Rather than overwhelming people with another email, seek to deliver valuable and relevant messages.
Personalization Resources:
Cookies.
They’re everywhere.
But… not for long.
If you haven’t heard, third-party cookies are going away in 2024.
As a newsletter operator, you need to understand this.
Almost every website you visit places third-party cookies on your browser. These cookies are then used to track your activity online so you can be targeted with ads.
The way it works is a company will take a “cookie” -– which is simply aggregated data — from site A and site B to give to site C.
As the owner of site C, you can then offer up advertisements that are relevant to your visitors based on the cookies placed on them from sites A and B. The cookie from those sites essentially acts as a crystal ball into who the customer is, what their demographics and preferences are, their past purchasing behavior, and more.
There’s one teeny, tiny problem with third-party cookies…
Readers have become increasingly concerned with digital privacy in the past few years. Third-party cookies are a concern to readers because they essentially identify a reader on multiple sites.
Google & the Death of Third-Party Cookies
In 2020, Google released a major announcement stating that they would be phasing out third-party cookies in Google Chrome in the latter part of 2024.
Additionally, on June 7, 2021, Apple launched iOS15 including the Mail Privacy Protection (MPP). This new feature offers greater privacy measures for Apple iPhone, iPad, and macOS users and prevents email marketers and advertisers from collecting information about them.
So, what’s the solution?
First-Party & Zero-Party Data
You need to find new ways to capture the audience's data – starting with first-party (and zero-party) cookies.
First-party cookies are similar to third-party cookies, except instead of being collected by multiple sites and aggregated before sending it to another site, it’s collected by one site and used by that same site.
How You Can Collect First-Party Data
Examples of first-party data collected on your website:
Website interactions
Mobile app interactions
Email newsletter interactions
Purchase history
CRM data
Point-of-sale
Subscription information
Call centers
Social media data
Zero-Party Data
Zero-party data is even more accurate and insightful than first-party data.
While first-party data is collected automatically through your website, zero-party data is data your audience voluntarily shares with you.
Examples of zero-party data:
Email forms (name, email, phone number)
Interactive quizzes or game responses
Polls
Surveys
Messages or emails with your audience
Loyalty program memberships
Multi-step opt-in forms
Interviews
Preference data
Purchase intentions
Feedback forms
Customer support history
Zero-party data is gold for any creator or brand looking to advance their newsletter strategy. This data gives you the most accurate picture of who your customers really are since they’re the ones telling you.
Plus, as the digital world becomes more privacy-focused, there’s no safer data type to collect regularly than zero-party data.
Key Action Points
Here’s how you can do this on a practical level:
Start collecting zero-party data and first-party data as soon as possible
Use advanced email newsletter software with built-in first-party data capture features
Create multiple sign-up forms to capture zero-party data
Spend time in your email software analyzing subscriber interests, behaviors, and demographics
Focus on email list growth to leverage zero and first-party data
Leverage third-party data while you can to grow your email list
Create multi-step opt-in forms to gather intel on your new subscribers
Pay attention to the newsletters your subscribers engage with the most
Make A/B testing part of weekly routine to better understand what your subscribers like
Focus on improving trust through BIMI and email domain warm-ups
First-Party & Zero-Party Data Resources:
In 2024, Artificial Intelligence (AI) is transforming the way we work and live at a rapid pace.
From smart virtual assistants to writing and image technology to self-driving cars — it’s increasingly becoming integrated into our everyday lives.
In 2023, we saw the explosion of artificial intelligence (AI) in the digital world.
With the groundbreaking launch of Open AI’s ChatGPT in late 2022, it didn’t take long for the AI revolution to begin.
Within weeks, AI took the forefront in several areas: automation, programming, writing, design, and more.
Open AI made history when ChatGPT became the fastest app to reach 1 million users in history.
It only took them five days.
Now, everybody wants more of AI — more technology, more knowledge, and more business applications. This led to the first of two major AI trends in the newsletter game:
The skyrocketing demand to stay up to date resulted in a surge of AI newsletters.
In 2023, a total of 3,159 AI newsletters were launched on beehiiv, making up 12.0% of all newsletters launched on the platform.
One example is Rowan Cheung of The Rundown AI. He built an audience of 300,000 (150,000 on both his Twitter and his beehiiv newsletter) in only 4 months in 2023.
In only five months, Saeed Ezzati grew his AI newsletter to 180,000 subscribers. What’s even more impressive is that he’s already on pace to make $150,000 annually from his newsletter.
This brings us to our next major AI trend…
AI Technology: The Next Digital Revolution Is Here
In 2023, beehiiv became the first-ever newsletter platform to roll out its own AI toolset to help creators optimize their content creation and newsletter performance.
beehiiv’s Artificial Intelligence is built specifically for newsletter operators.
It’s integrated directly into the beehiiv platform within the text editor, making it the best editor in the newsletter world more powerful and dynamic than ever before.
More AI Content Means You Need to Craft Better Newsletters
AI enables content creators to create content easier and quicker than ever which will inevitably lead to more content online.
While using AI can give you an advantage you can have in the marketplace, you need to understand that the newsletter industry will become more competitive, and the sheer volume of content will increase.
What does this mean for you and your newsletter?
You need to double down on the quality and uniqueness of your newsletter content.
It has never been more important to create high-value newsletter content.
Key Action Points
Here’s how you can leverage AI and craft unique content on a practical level:
Leverage AI tools like ChatGPT and beehiiv AI to streamline your content creation
Create a newsletter template to stay congruent in your content
Write short, punchy words, sentences, and paragraphs
Integrate storytelling into your content as much as possible
Brand your newsletter using design tactics like specific fonts, colors, and a logo.
Here’s what we can expect to see with newsletter designs in 2024:
Weave in different media (i.e. photos, images, videos, GIFs)
Integrate sponsored ads that are both relevant and designed well to integrate easily into your newsletter
Leverage beehiiv polls to see how well your individual newsletters resonate with your subscribers
Subscribe to the top newsletters and take notes on what they do well
You can read case studies and creator spotlights to learn specific tactics from the top newsletter creators that make them successful in the next section!
AI Resources
Moving forward, email newsletters continue to be a powerful communication channel for brands, marketers, and the continual rise of creators.
As we navigate the ever-evolving world of email newsletters, several key takeaways can guide our path forward into 2024 and beyond:
Optimize Automations From the Get-Go Make a great first impression with your new subscribers. Focus on building out automations starting with your welcome series and onboarding flows to keep them engaged, interested, and on the path to a deeper connection with you.
Lean Into Analytics: If you aren’t paying attention to the numbers, they’re not likely to grow. To measure your progress effectively, ensure you’re spending time every month going over your email analytics. Track your subscribers, and where they’re coming from so you can double down on acquisition tactics.
Embrace Zero-Party and First-Party Data: With third-party cookies phasing out in the second half of 2024, begin making the shift towards collecting zero-party and first-party data to better understand your audience, personalize emails, and improve your subscribers’ experiences.
Crank Up A/B Testing: Don't shy away from leaning into significant A/B testing, such as testing images, subject lines, body copy, newsletter formats, and more. These experiments can yield more impactful results, helping you refine your email content effectively and optimize quickly.
AI Integration: Scaling your email efforts with Artificial Intelligence is key. 2023 saw a dramatic leap forward in terms of AI’s ability to help automate and improve email newsletters. Subscribe to AI newsletters to stay in tune with the changing landscape and leverage tools like beehiiv AI to streamline your newsletter operations.
Humanize Your Brand: Leverage AI, but don’t let it take control of the heart and mission of your business. Use AI tools to research, automate, and create content, but also integrate personality and storytelling into your newsletter content.
Invest in Your “Owned” Audience: Newsletters are an incredible medium you can use to build a close-knit community. Get into the trenches with your audience — reply to their emails, interact with them on social media, and engage with them via surveys and polls.
The future of email newsletters in 2024 is exciting, offering new opportunities for growth, revenue, and audience engagement. Personalization, automation, data collection, and quality content will be the key drivers for success.
Also, keep an eye out for more and more acquisitions in the newsletter space.
It's crucial to continue to stay up to date with the trends and technologies shaping the email newsletter landscape. Leveraging creator-first tools like beehiiv for newsletter publishing, list building, and monetization will be invaluable to ensure the continued success of your email marketing strategy.
By aligning your strategy with these insights, you’ll be better positioned to harness the full potential of email newsletters both now and in the future.
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