Methodology

Sources & methodology

How the Newsletter Benchmarks dataset is assembled and where each figure comes from.

How the data is assembled

All values are medians aggregated from publicly available newsletter and email marketing industry reports. Each record is tagged by category, list size, ESP, and year so you can narrow to the slice that matches your own program. Where a source does not publish a breakdown at the granularity shown here, the record is attributed to the closest available cohort. Figures are stored as decimals (e.g. 0.42 means 42%) and rendered as medians — not means — so a single outlier cohort in one report does not skew the view.

This is a living reference. As new industry reports are published, records are appended rather than overwritten, so the dataset reflects both current and historical benchmarks.

Known gaps

No separately branded Beehiiv 2023 report exists — the 2024 edition is the first.
Annual 2021–2023 global email-marketing market-size figures are paywalled on Statista.
No free public IAB or eMarketer figure isolates newsletter-specific ad spend; the creator-economy total is the closest proxy.
Litmus 2024 device-share percentages live in a PDF with specific figures not surfaced in public excerpts.
Passionfroot does not publish a comparable free benchmark.
Beehiiv subject-line and hour-of-day data has no comparable cross-platform free benchmark.

Primary sources

Submit data or corrections

Spotted a figure that doesn’t match a citeable source, or have a public report to add? Email spencernicolls@gmail.com with a link to the source and the relevant figure.