Why countdown clocks in emails are (almost) at the end
2. January 2024
Accessibility in email marketing
1. July 2024
Market Shares of the Email Service Providers
for the Top 1,000 Online Shops in North America
If you are looking for a professional email marketing solution, the options available can be as vast as choosing a car. There’s an abundance of traditional brands, budget-friendly alternatives, innovative newcomers, and a range of mid-range offerings to consider.
However, unlike the automotive market, finding a reliable overview of which email marketing solution dominates each industry sector can be a challenging task. Obtaining an honest answer can prove surprisingly elusive. It involves defining a user base, identifying the email marketing systems in use, and navigating through various new questions that arise, such as evaluating solutions that utilize third-party sending services.
But fret not, we’ve already taken care of all that legwork. Fortunately, we had access to the invaluable research conducted by Digital Commerce 360 for our sample. We focused on the top 1,000 e-retailers in North America (when we did a similar analysis in 2021, we accessed Alexa Traffic Rank and manually selected the 1,000 most trafficked online stores).
We subscribed to email newsletters from these retailers whenever possible and meticulously analyzed the emails (if any were received) to determine the email service provider, if identifiable. This comprehensive approach provided us with the essential data needed to construct a meaningful ranking of the most popular email marketing systems in use. For more details on our methodology, please refer to the information box below.
20 Most Popular Email Marketing Solutions 2023 Among the Largest 1000 North-American E-Retailers
Klaviyo, Salesforce, Listrak in 1st to 3rd place – are you surprised? Experts we spoke to were not surprised by the proliferation of Salesforce Marketing Cloud as a very powerful solution far beyond pure email marketing. Equally unsurprising was Klaviyo, which has grown strongly in recent years with turnkey integrations for all major online store systems, making it easy to use purchase and product data for lifecycle campaigns. What was surprising for American email marketing experts however, was how strong Klaviyo’s position has become – more than one in five of the 1,000 largest e-retailers use the solution in an otherwise very fragmented market. Listrak in third place was unexpected for some experts, even though the solution has been around for a very long time. The high brand loyalty of some retailers may play a role here. Listrak may also have benefited disproportionately from the customers of Oracle Bronto, who had to reorient themselves after this service was discontinued.
For a list of the other 39 email marketing providers and their market share among the top 1,000 e-retailers in North America, click here.
Navigating the Fragmented Email Provider Market: A Crowded Field of Competitors
These three account for just under half of the market (46.9%) – the rest is spread across 56 other platforms, of which Iterable and Mailchimp are the most popular with 4.6% each. The 39 platforms outside the top 20 account for less than 9% of the market and sometimes have only one verifiable customer among the top 1000 e-retailers. This market fragmentation is striking. We have seen a similar pattern in our annual surveys of the German-speaking market. We will be watching the US market to see if it consolidates over the next few years.
An interesting dichotomy emerges when we look at the age of the vendors in the top 20. Most of the solutions in the top 20 saw the light of day between 1995 and 2001. While some of these solutions have been revamped over the years, they are still conceptually and programmatically based on a technology stack that is now quite old. They include Salesforce Marketing Cloud (formerly Exacttarget), Listrak, Mailchimp, SAP Emarsys, Oracle Responsys, Adobe Campaign, Constant Contact, Zeta Global (formerly eDialog) and Acoustic Campaign (formerly Silverpop/IBM Watson Marketing). This contrasts with a group of vendors that are technologically newer, founded between 2010 and 2015. These include Iterable, Cordial, Braze, Bluecore, Blueshift, Bloomreach and Simon Data. In between are Hubspot (2006) and Sailthru (2008). Notably, two of the older “millennial” vendors remain at the top: Salesforce and Listrak. Other “classic” ESPs such as Oracle Responsys, Adobe Campaign, Constant Contact, Epsilon, Zeta Global and Acoustic Campaign have been overtaken in market share by younger players such as Iterable, Cordial, Braze and Bluecore. And Klaviyo, another newer player, has overtaken them all – including Salesforce and Listrak.
There is no guarantee, however, that these shifts will lead to fundamental consolidation. It is possible that the market needs a great deal of diversity because customer needs vary widely. We also looked at the extent to which the market share situation is changing when we look at sub-segments: The top 100 e-retailers, the “medium” segment from 101 to 500 and the comparatively “small” stores from 501 to 1000 (but these are not really small either, otherwise they would not be in the top 1000).
Drill Down Reveals Cost Optimizers and Value Maximizers
A surprising finding: Among the 100 largest shops, Salesforce Marketing Cloud dominates with 30 (!) e-retailers, as many as the next 6 solutions combined – and 10 times as many as Klaviyo. The reason for this is probably that Salesforce and the other “enterprise” solutions like Oracle and Adobe offer a homogenized multi-cloud portfolio, where it makes sense for customers to also use the marketing automation component of an overall system. The licensing costs here are usually relatively high, so it is plausible that large enterprises tend to rely on such solutions. The fact that Klaviyo is less represented here was to be expected. After all, Klaviyo IS represented, while Listrak, which came in third overall, does not appear at all. The other newer contenders that integrate backend sending services such as Sendgrid, Amazon SES, Mailgun, and Sparkpost for email delivery are also relatively well represented (Braze, Bluecore, Cordial, Iterable, Blueshift), which shows a certain willingness to innovate among the largest e-retailers.
In the mid-market segment, the market shares start to look like the global results above, but Salesforce is still (just) ahead of Klaviyo. Listrak suddenly has a strong presence, and the previously unmentioned SAP Emarsys is also relatively strong here with 18 stores. At the “lower” end, Klaviyo is clearly the most represented with 130 out of 500 shops (more than one in four!), Listrak is well ahead of Salesforce, followed by Mailchimp. This analysis clearly shows that market segments have different solution preferences – sales in the 501 to 1000 range may not allow for (or require?) a multichannel marketing automation platform, the focus is on lower pricing.
Our hypothesis: When it comes to email marketing, the e-commerce market is divided between “value maximizers,” who want to get the most out of their customers with powerful tools, and “cost optimizers,” who want to generate email sales with as little effort as possible. This classification correlates with the size of the company, but does not allow for a fixed allocation: there tend to be fewer cost-minimizers among the largest e-retailers, but they do exist – and so all solution classes can be found in all market segments, albeit with a different distribution.
What all these companies have in common is an interesting fact that is not visible in the ranking: of the 1,000 stores in the population, we received marketing emails from 906 of them. This shows that good old-fashioned email is alive and well and an important sales tool for most e-retailers. And as long as that is the case, there will be plenty of vendors trying to get in the stores’ good graces.
Webinar: “The Most Popular ESPs for US E-Retailers”
We’ve presented our findings in a “Only Influencers” webinar in January ’24 and were joined by Chris Marriott of Email Connect who provided commentary and analysis on the findings and trends in the North American email marketing industry.
39 Other Platforms Used by the Top 1,000 E-Retailers
| Email Service Provider | Market Share |
| Zaius (Optimizely) | 0.6% |
| Active Campaign | 0.4% |
| Attentive | 0.4% |
| Cheetah Digital | 0.4% |
| Drip* | 0.4% |
| Microsoft 365 | 0.4% |
| Whatcounts | 0.4% |
| Campaign Monitor | 0.3% |
| dotmailer | 0.3% |
| Elastic Email | 0.3% |
| Optimove* | 0.3% |
| Oracle (Eloqua) | 0.3% |
| Selligent | 0.3% |
| Brevo | 0.2% |
| Delivra | 0.2% |
| Listmonk* | 0.2% |
| Mapp | 0.2% |
| Ometria* | 0.2% |
| Salesforce Pardot | 0.2% |
| Wunderkind* | 0.2% |
| Act-On Software | 0.1% |
| Customer.io* | 0.1% |
| Emma | 0.1% |
| Google G Suite | 0.1% |
| iContact | 0.1% |
| Interspire* | 0.1% |
| Adobe Marketo | 0.1% |
| Maropost | 0.1% |
| Merkle 4Cite | 0.1% |
| MessageGears | 0.1% |
| Microsoft Dynamics 365 | 0.1% |
| Omnisend* | 0.1% |
| SALESmanago | 0.1% |
| SDL Alterian | 0.1% |
| Seguno* | 0.1% |
| Sendgrid Marketing Campaigns | 0.1% |
| Shopify | 0.1% |
| Sympa | 0.1% |
| Zoho | 0.1% |
Sending services (no front end tool detected)**
| Sendgrid (Sending Service) | 4.1% |
| Amazon SES (Sending Service) | 1.5% |
| Mailgun (Sending Service) | 0.8% |
| SparkPost (Sending Service) | 0.2% |
| SocketLabs | 0.1% |
| Sender not detected (inhouse) | 0.9% |
| Sending Script | 0.3% |
Our Research Methodology
This is what we did
- Base population is the top 1,000 e-retailers in North America, as ranked by revenue by Digital Commerce 360 (ranked by 2022 web sales. Digital Commerce 360 Report date: October 2023, web sales range: $41 million to $373 billion)
- Newsletter sign-ups were conducted on the website of the retailer’s primary store (highest revenue store, as ranked by Digital Commerce 360).
- Only free email services were subscribed to. If a retailer sends emails only to buyers and not to prospects, we cannot take this into account.
- 906 of these 1,000 e-retailers sent us emails during the six-month study period (June 2023 – Nov 2023).
- Platform detection is done by analyzing email headers and email source code. We were able to identify companies’ email platforms or sending services 99% of the time. However, in some cases (about 7%) we only found a sending service, but not a front-end marketing automation solution that uses that service. Dear email marketers, please mention your platform in the email header from now on!
- Percentage market share is calculated from the total number of companies that sent at least one email. There is no weighting of companies (e.g. by number of emails sent or online sales), all e-retailers are counted equally.
- The analysis does not take into account whether a retailer owns more than one brand. For example: Amazon.com Inc. primary brand: Amazon.com – Amazon’s other U.S. brands (wholefoods.com, zappos.com, abebooks.com, souq.com, bookdepository.com, woot.com, comixology.com, irobot.com) are not part of the base population.
- This should be obvious, but we’ll stress it anyway: we didn’t rate or judge the quality of any company, online store, marketing communication or email distribution platform, we just looked at the numbers with a scientific approach.
Footnotes:
* Detected front end tool – using a sending service in the back end
** Market share in percentage, minus the percentage of e-retailers for which we were able to identify the front-end marketing automation solution sending via a sending service. Where we were able to identify the front-end solution, the market share was attributed to that solution.
