The most popular email marketing tools of the top 1,000 US online stores

We recently discovered this in a study, in which we identified the largest online stores for physical goods in the USA and, as far as possible, subscribed to their marketing newsletters (learn more about the methodology). For example, we have identified the most popular email service providers at the moment and observed some interesting trends — but first of all, a few basics:

• Email marketing remains extremely popular in the USA. Over 95% of the 1,000 identified online shops offer an email subscription. (Tell that to anyone who says email marketing isn't cool anymore.)
• During the investigation period November 2020 to May 2021, we received marketing emails from 859 shops in which we were able to identify 96% of the sending service used. The market shares in our ranking relate to this.
• Not only are there a large number of providers, the market shares are also broadly diversified: No provider dominates the market, even the top 5 together have a market share of less than 50%. (By the way, it looks very similar on the German market: The email marketing of Germany's 1,000 top-selling online shops)

One last thing: When we An evaluation of the US e-commerce market for the first time in 2016 , the discussion arose as to whether it is legitimate to talk about a market at all. We will explain why we are continuing to do so below.

The 20 email service providers with the highest distribution in the USA

 Die 20 E-Mail-Marketing-Lösungen mit der größten Verbreitung im US Top 1000 E-Commerce 2021

With 146 online shops, Salesforce Marketing Cloud is the clear leader. Klaviyo is in a strong second place. Both have improved compared to our market evaluation in 2016 — although we would like to stress that we had a different methodology and population back then.

Salesforce has massively increased its footprint since then, for example with the acquisition of Demandware (now Salesforce Commerce Cloud) and is successful by offering a comprehensive CRM with integrated shop and marketing systems. While Salesforce positions itself as a broad-based provider of a family of highly integrated solutions, Klaviyo acts as a “classic” marketing automation player with “out-of-the-box” interfaces to a variety of popular online shop systems.

Klaviyo is also an attractive option for small companies with growth potential, as they also offer a freemium model. Klaviyo's offer seems to be well received, as shown not only by the high market share of the top 1000 e-commerce companies in our study, but also by the high level of interest and trust from investors: Klaviyo only raised 320 million US dollars this March and is now valued at almost 10 billion US dollars.

Further down in this article, you'll find a full list of 68 email marketing solution providers and their market shares among the top 1,000 online stores for physical consumer goods in the USA.

Two very different providers are therefore at the forefront. However, there are also major shifts as the ranking progresses, with many mid-market systems still holding their ground on the market. The results for 2021 cannot be compared 1:1 with our figures from 2016, but there are still trends:

• Mailchimp is significantly weaker than in 2016. Back then, the solution clearly led the ranking with 26% market share; in our latest study, Mailchimp is 6th with 5%.
• Some younger players are moving forward, solutions such as Iterable, Cordial or Braze maintain their place in the top 20. Together, the three mentioned have a market share of 6.5%, more than Mailchimp. Noticeable: They (like Klaviyo) all rely on sending services — more about that below!
• One of the biggest “newcomers” in the top ten (and the only company with roots outside the USA) is Emarsys, which has had a US headquarters in Indianapolis since 2015 and was acquired by SAP in 2020. SAP sees itself in a league with Salesforce in the area of CRM, but is virtually unable to score points when it comes to email marketing with its traditional SAP Marketing Cloud solution in the USA (similar to its home market of Germany, by the way). It therefore seems only logical that SAP bought Emarsys last year, a player that has achieved strong growth in the USA and also in Asia in recent years — particularly in e-commerce.
• Constant Contact's market share is significantly smaller than we would have expected based on 2016 figures (6.2%). The current 0.8% customer share among the top 1,000 e-commerce companies feels like a crash.
• “Well-known” enterprise providers such as Oracle (with Responsys acquired in 2013) or Cheetah Digital (still flying the flag of Experian in 2016) and Acoustic Campaign (still Silverpop/IBM Watson in 2016) maintain their market shares in the moderate single-digit percentage range — although they all came onto the market 15 or more years ago and can therefore no longer be considered as fresh in the basic technology.
• It is surprising that Oracle's Bronto is still being used by 3.5 percent of the top 1,000 companies just over a year before the announced end-of-life and thus even maintains a place in the top 10. Some marketeers are likely to have a move ahead of them this year — and we are eagerly watching where those who are forced to make the switch will go.

The success of Sendgrid, Sparkpost, Amazon SES and Mailgun: “Sending is trending”

 Die 20 E-Mail-Versanddienstleister mit der größten Verbreitung im US Top 1000 E-Commerce 2021

One underlying trend that has the potential to permanently change the market is sending services: developer-oriented sending platforms that take over email delivery — either by being addressed directly from the website/shop via API — or as a background service provider for another email service provider (although some providers, such as Sendgrid, also offer both, i.e. both a marketing automation front end for business customers and a sending service backend for email marketing providers).

If you only look at the actual email senders instead of the email marketing providers in the “frontend”, our ranking changes significantly: Klaviyo disappears just like the “youngsters” Braze, Cordial and Iterable mentioned above. In return, Sendgrid is moving up to 1st place with just under 20% market share. SparkPost, Amazon SES and Mailgun are also among the sending services that are making a big leap up in the ranking. In total, instead of 68 solutions, we “only” count 53 different solutions.

The trend towards sending services has two fundamental effects:

1. Large email sending platforms benefit.

Sending services benefit extremely from economies of scale — the more a service is used, the sooner it can offer low prices per sent email (CPM). A self-reinforcing effect, which, however, involves the risk of a market oligopole. This puts pressure on providers in particular who differentiate themselves based on price.

2. The market continues to open up.

Anyone who, as an email service provider (ESP), handles delivery via sending services, can offer a campaign front end without worrying about the technically complex issue of delivery, which is rather cumbersome for many. The barriers to market entry in the form of investments and know-how are therefore becoming lower, especially for multichannel platforms for which email is just one of many channels.

Conclusion: What does it all mean?

A comprehensive analysis should not only look at what is obvious, but also those findings that are easily overlooked, for example due to their “failure to change.” Our study shows that despite high momentum, there is still no consolidation on the market: 68 providers or 53 senders from 1,000 online shops means that many solutions are only used by relatively few customers. Even the leading solutions have less than 20% market share based on the number of users.

But above all, we see another “no change”: There is no clear trend away from email (yet). Almost all online shops use the channel. The sheer mass of emails (50000 emails) that we have received from the top 1,000 U.S. online stores in the last six months alone suggests that the old medium is still vital and that it has a high uplift and customer lifetime value.

This shows that although email may no longer be the coolest channel, social media, app push, messengers are younger, fresher and sometimes more direct. But no channel is as good at consistently reaching out to large volumes of potential and existing customers across the entire customer life cycle with personalized messages. The many newer providers, who invest massively in the email channel, probably agree. And a fragmented market also means that there is a wide variety of solutions for different requirements — from very cheap to very powerful.

Market shares of email service providers in the top 1,000 US online stores for physical goods

On request, we would be happy to share the complete overview of the market shares of email marketing sending solutions in US e-commerce 2021 with you. We carry out this study regularly, so please also read our latest study for an up-to-date market overview of current market shares.

Methodology: What have we done?

For our study, we sorted the 20,000 most visited U.S. websites (according to Alexa rank, as of 28.10.2020) in descending order of size and manually searched for online shops. In doing so, we identified the 1,000 best-reaching shops and marketplaces that sell physical consumer goods. Shops that only sell digital products or services, media/news portals, streaming providers such as Netflix, online meeting platforms such as Zoom, educational offers, online gaming platforms, insurance companies, etc. are not part of the investigation.

We subscribed to email newsletters wherever this was possible without completing a purchase. We have clearly identified the email service providers and sending services used by analyzing the email headers.

In our previous study from 2016, the basis was 4,166 e-commerce websites with the highest Alexa and Internet retailer top 1000 rankings, resulting in a different population. The further procedure was in principle the same as in 2020.

When is a market a market?

When we carried out an evaluation of the US e-commerce market for the first time in 2016, there was a discussion as to whether it was even legitimate to talk about a market. Can you even juxtapose email services like Mailchimp with a free entry-level offering with powerful multi-channel marketing automation platforms such as Salesforce Marketing Cloud in a spreadsheet? Or are we comparing apples with oranges here?

In our opinion, our ranking is methodologically valid — because firstly, every email service provider offers a solution for the basic need of an online shop to send emails. That is a theoretical/academic reason that can be discussed. But secondly, there is a much stronger practical reason: Our 2016 study showed that although (not surprisingly) Salesforce Marketing Cloud is used more by large e-commerce providers and Mailchimp by smaller ones. But there are no separate markets: Even in the segment of the 10% most visited websites, Mailchimp was used, and vice versa, some of the 10% weakest websites in our population also use the Salesforce solution. Our conclusion: The solutions exist in parallel in a common market.

¹ 20 Most Popular Email Marketing Solutions of the Top 1,000 Online Shops in the U.S. n = 859 of the 1,000 largest online stores for physical consumer goods that sent us emails during the six-month investigation period (November 2020 — May 2021). The percentage market share is calculated from the number of companies that have sent us at least one email.

² 20 Most Popular Email sending services of the Top 1,000 Online Shops in the U.S. n = 859 of the 1,000 largest online stores for physical consumer goods that sent us emails during the six-month investigation period (November 2020 — May 2021). The percentage market share is calculated from the number of companies that have sent us at least one email.

* 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).