Study on email marketing of the 1,000 top-selling German online shops 2022
Every year since 2018, as part of the E-Commerce Market Germany Study by the EHI Retail Institute and Statista, we have been investigating which tools the 1,000 largest German B2C online shops use for their email marketing. And for the past five years, we've been confirming two things time and again:
First, Email continues to be an important and valuable channel: In 2022, 94.4% of online shops and marketplaces will continue to offer their customers a newsletter subscription1. And secondly, almost all shops use it for this professional email service providers (ESP) or API-based sending services — but use a variety of solutions in a fragmented market.
Here you can find the latest analysis results for Email marketing from the top 1000 e-commerce companies in Germany 2024
ESP market: Confusing, fragmented and unevenly distributed
The leader of the standings SAP Emarsys loses slightly, but this is due to the fact that we have adjusted our methodology and show a slightly higher population3. In fact, 184 shops use Emarsys compared to 183 stores in the previous year. Salesforce Marketing Cloud remains similarly stable in second position. Together, the two have around a third of the market share (32.3%) — there is therefore still enough market left for the other providers, and there is still no sign of real consolidation.
A five-year comparison shows that Emarsys maintains its leading position well with only slight fluctuations, salesforce By contrast, was able to almost double its market share from 2018 to 2020 and has more or less maintained this success since then.
The third-place winner Optimizely (formerly Episerver/Optivo), on the other hand, has had a five-year descent, from 12.2% (2018) to 6.7% today. Auch Mailchimp has lost consistently since 2018 and is only 3.4%. In 2021, 40 of the top 1000 online shops still relied on the chimpanzee provider, in 2022 it is only 29. Whether this is due to the fact that even four years after the GDPR came into force, Mailchimp still does not offer an EU data center for European customers? In any case, this is the biggest absolute loss in our evaluation, followed closely by Inxmail, which have been losing market share since 2019. More than halved Mapp from 5.1% market share in 2018 to 2.1% today, the same applies to Cheetah Digital (from 3 to 1.1%), although the sender remains stable in the current year. Stable are also Oracle and adobe; they are around the 3 percent mark over the entire period of time.
CleverReach moves up to fourth place and improves compared to the previous year (from 5.8 to 6.3%). In a long-term comparison, the provider has thus made up for some lost ground, as CleverReach was at least 7% from 2018 to 2020. Record the biggest absolute gain Sendinblue (+13 shops) and Klaviyo (+10), two lean email automation platforms that also allow the creation of landing pages, social advertising or SMS. Klaviyo focuses on e-commerce customers, offers integrations with many shop systems and entered into a strategic partnership with Shopify in 2022 — so it's not surprising that the platform is steadily gaining market share over a five-year comparison. In a long-term comparison, there were also positive Rapidmail and GetResponse developed, but without much change in the last year. It is also remarkable BloomReach (formerly Exponea), which, with 1.2% market share (previous year: 0.8%), appears for the first time in the list of the 20 most-used systems and are currently actively entering the German market.
5-year trend: How (un) mobile is the market?
The interim conclusion is that lean solutions are showing the strongest growth, which offer many different functions but have a lower functional depth than the large marketing automation solutions — while they are stagnating. Has the market been exhausted here for the big players?
In principle, we do not see much willingness to change in our time series. We looked at all shops that were consistently represented in the population of the top 1000 German online shops over the last five years — 266 of these 396 shops did not change platforms, i.e. around two thirds (67.2%). Around 30% (118 shops) switched once, only 10 shops twice and two shops even three times.
This confirms our previous idea: Anyone who has built up know-how and personnel to operate a complex solution will think carefully about switching — and anyone who uses a lean and functional solution often has neither the capacity nor the very high benefit to take on the effort of changing platforms.
Our guess: In the end, most companies stick to their established internal email marketing DNA, which tells users of “simple” solutions that they don't need more than what they have. As early as 2020, we had put forward the thesis that the market was divided into benefit maximizers and cost minimizers and the latter are not interested in a high-end solution at all. For smaller e-commerce companies, this may be the better path in the face of a highly competitive labor market for experts who can tap into the full potential of larger platforms. Because anyone who does not use the options will ultimately only have higher costs. Even without a shortage of skilled workers, enterprise platforms must improve results that more than compensate for the costs of licenses, external consulting and implementation, as well as internal CRM and platform specialists.
View of the overall market: ESP dominates, market fragmented
We received newsletters from 870 of the 1,000 shops2 — and an overwhelming majority of 96.6% of them send via an ESP or use a “sending service.” The latter are solutions that are connected directly to the B2C online shop or other (in-house) marketing systems through interfaces (APIs). A small proportion of 1.3% of email marketing operators use the shipping solution integrated in the shop system or a shipping script or their own solutions whose delivery technology is not available to us (1.5%). In the previous year, this share was significantly higher at 4.7%. This continues the trend of recent years: More and more B2C online shops rely on external email service providers when it comes to topics such as mail server configuration, shipping management or email deliverability.
Among the 846 B2C online shops and hybrid B2C marketplaces, we identified a total of 76 different email delivery platforms. Only shops and marketplaces that sent emails via a shipping platform identified as an ESP, sending service or email module of a web shop during the investigation period of 12 months were considered.3
The use of the systems is still not evenly distributed: 84.2% of the 846 B2C online shops and hybrid B2C marketplaces use one of the 20 most common platforms, while 38 platforms are only used by one or two of the 1,000 top-selling shops.
The market shares of 76 email service providers among the EHI top 1,000 e-commerce companies in Germany3
On request, we would be happy to share with you the complete overview and 5-year trend of the market shares of the email marketing delivery solutions used in German e-commerce in 2022. We conduct this study every year, so please also read our latest study for an up-to-date market overview of current market shares. If you are interested in more information about the 2022 data, we recommend the detailed study by EHI/Statista
About the methodology
Compared to previous years, our population has changed slightly, as we included senders of shop modules that we were able to identify (e.g. from Shopware, Shopify, Websale) and listed them together with Sending Services and ESPs.
The evaluation is based on a data collection of the 1,000 best-selling B2C online shops and hybrid B2C marketplaces (according to the EHI/STATISTA study E-Commerce Market Germany 2022) from August 2021 to August 2022. The percentage market share is calculated from the number of retailers where the respective sender was identifiable.
1 Basis: The 1,000 best-selling B2C online shops and selected marketplaces 2021, determined by EHI Retail Institute “E-Commerce Market Germany 2022", sorted by e-commerce sales in fiscal year 2021.
2 Online stores that sent at least one marketing email in the 12-month investigation period in percent. n = 870.
3 Online shops that sent emails via a shipping platform identified as an ESP, shop module or sending service* during the 12-month investigation period. The percentage market share is calculated from the number of companies for which the respective sender was identifiable. n = 846.
* excluding companies that use this sending service as backend senders of marketing automation — in this case, the “front-end” tool was included in this list (if the respective ESP was identifiable).
** SendingServices will be ranked for the first time in 2021
