The Publicare email study 2014
Almost exactly one year ago, in a first major email study, Publicare evaluated several million anonymized data sets to find out which providers in Germany actually receive marketing emails. Here is the new edition of this study for 2014, which we were also able to carry out a trend analysis for the first time this year.
Here you can find the latest analysis results for most popular email services in Germany 2024
Key findings
Germany's consumers prefer German providers. According to our study, a good 90% of all actively used e-mail accounts are held by one of the ten largest service companies. As was the case last year, the top 10 are led by United Internet as the undisputed market leader (44.1%), followed by Deutsche Telekom (11.0%) by some margin. Freenet is also back in the leading group with 4.6% in sixth place. As a result, German consumers still prefer to use “email made in Germany”: at least 61.5%. By the way, the proportion of email addresses that end in “.de” has increased significantly since 2013 — by a whopping 3.7%.
Tip for email marketers: Anyone who sends B2C marketing emails for Germany should still be particularly careful when optimizing campaigns for GMX, web.de and t-online.
Germany's consumers remain loyal to their email addresses for a long time. Our trend analysis shows that the market is not moving much — at least as far as the email addresses actively used to receive marketing communications are concerned. Once Germany's consumers have decided on an email address, it accompanies it, it seems like a digital ID for a long time through the customer lifecycle. This is not only reflected in minimal trend movements in provider distribution. Due to the replacement of Microsoft's Hotmail service by Outlook.com, we have jointly evaluated the hotmail, outlook, live and msn domains this year. Lo and behold: Despite the new platform, the lion's share of German Microsoft mail users remained loyal to their “@hotmail .com” address (7.3% compared to 7.7% last year).
Gmail overtakes Yahoo. The striking “winner” in our trend analysis is the US giant Google with its email service Gmail, which overtakes competitor Yahoo with 7.9% of all email addresses this year. We saw an overall increase of 1.7% for Gmail compared to last year. One possible explanation for this could be the growing number of Android-based mobile devices, all of which cannot be used without a Gmail address.
All results in the infographic
