Which email marketing software do the top-selling German online shops use in 2019?
In 2019, the EHI Retail Institute once again identified the 1,000 top-selling German e-commerce companies. * Building on this, we investigated for the EHI Retail Institute for the second time after 2018 how these online shops do email marketing. The exciting question: Can trends be identified in overall usage, in the systems and platforms used, and in market consolidation?
As in 2018, we subscribed to email newsletters from the shops identified by EHI for a minimum period of three months (provided this was possible without online shopping). The email systems used in each case were identified using technical features that we can identify in the newsletters. The 1,000 e-commerce operators with the highest turnover in 2019 are not the same as in 2018:179 shops are new to the general*.
Here you can find the latest analysis results for Email marketing from the top 1000 e-commerce companies in Germany 2024
On the state of the email nation
At first glance, the results are similar: As in the previous year, email remains the most important channel in digital push communication — 95% of the online shops examined still offer email subscriptions (955) **. And as in 2018, almost all send marketing emails (924), but a quarter only send out 1 to 2 times a quarter, at least in freely subscribable regular communication. Despite numerous new shops in the EHI ranking, the rate of those using an external email service provider (ESP) remains stable: 83% (2018:82%) send their promotional emails via a service provider that brings together all central functions under one roof, from email production to segmentation and distribution management to delivery and analysis. This includes omni and multichannel marketing suites that serve other channels in addition to email, from mobile and web push to social media ads and print. Sending services with a functional focus on API-based email shipments such as Amazon SES, Sendgrid, Mandrill and Sparkpost are only favored by 3% of shops, “self-made” solutions come to 8% and at 6% no shipping system was identifiable for us. Further explanations of our terminological classification can be found in the blog post from the previous year.
Market shares and trends of email service providers in Germany
The more mature the markets, the more providers are consolidating? We can't see any of this in the email marketing of the 1,000 online shops surveyed in Germany year on year: we identified 66 different email service providers (2018:64) ***. Of these, 11 are new to the list, but, as expected, are relatively “low” in the market share list and together represent only 2.3% of the ESP market segment examined. As in the previous year, the majority is spread over the ten most-used platforms (76%, a slight increase of 1.5 percentage points) — when looking at the 20 most popular platforms, the figure is as high as 88% (minus 1 percentage point).
The platforms themselves have also remained essentially the same: Only one email service provider is new in the group of the 20 most common systems. But precisely because there is very little movement overall, some market changes are all the more obvious:
- Emarsys Marketing Platform is the most commonly used system. From 168 stores in 2018, the figure rises to 178 in 2019. In terms of market share, the multichannel platform provider grew by 1.3 percentage points compared to the previous year, while Episerver Campaign (formerly Optivo Broadmail) — the solution with the second-highest distribution — recorded 1.2 percentage points less than in 2018, or 10 fewer stores in absolute terms. In the EHI Top 1,000 e-commerce companies market segment, this means that for the first time, Emarsys has a market share of 23.3% that of Episerver (11%)
- Salesforce Marketing Cloud is one of the few platforms that can change their position within the top 10: The platform is the third most represented (+21 shops); CleverReach had this position in 2018. The market share in the investigated segment rose from 5.3% to 8.1% and has thus grown by more than 50%.
- Significantly fewer of the online shops examined use Mapp: While there were 39 in 2018, in 2019 we found a total of 28 e-commerce operators in the corresponding entirety — a relative change of minus 28%.
List of 66 email service providers among the EHI Top 1,000 e-commerce companies in Germany
On request, we would be happy to share a complete overview of the market shares of the email marketing delivery solutions used in German e-commerce in 2019. We conduct this study every year, so please also read our latest study for an up-to-date market overview of market shares. If you are interested in more information about the 2019 data, we recommend the detailed study by EHI/Statista.
Method and population
We generally differentiate between three populations:
*Basis: The 1,000 best-selling German B2C online shops for physical goods in 2019, determined by EHI Retail Institute for the study “E-Commerce Market Germany 2019", sorted by e-commerce sales in fiscal year 2018.
**Basis: 924 of the 1,000 shops that sent us emails during the investigation period of at least 3 months.
***Basis: 765 of the 1,000 shops that sent us emails via a shipping platform identified as ESP during the investigation period of at least 3 months: The percentage market share is calculated from the number of companies for which the respective ESP was identifiable.
