One of the trickiest parts of being a creator is that there’s seemingly nobody around to tell you if you’re on the right path. There are no pre-set assignments to follow or expectations to meet—it’s just you and your audience on a journey together.
That’s where email marketing stats come in.
Tracking your email’s performance and the audience’s reaction to your content is your guiding light. Consistently referencing key metrics gives you something to compare your work against to decide if you should keep going, rework, or leave a strategy behind.
While the best thing you can do is compare your current efforts to your past self, it’s still nice to see how you compare to the ‘average’ creator. That’s why we’ve measured progress from Kit users to bring you these 2024 creator email marketing benchmarks.
Creators are using email marketing more than ever to grow their business
We hear inspiring creator stories every day that illustrate the impact that email marketing has on creator businesses.
These aren’t just anecdotal stories.
Our research repeatedly proves that email marketing for creator businesses continues to grow.
Professional creators prefer email over social media for engagement
Last year, we published our second State of the Creator Economy Report, which revealed that full-time creators trust email marketing to grow their businesses.
One in four full-time creators sees the best audience engagement through email, beating out other popular channels like social media.
Most creators take advantage of email marketing’s power. Our first report found that 81% of professional creators use an email marketing tool.
Apps like Kit, Mailchimp, and ActiveCampaign allow creators to stay in contact with their audience without relying on ever-changing social media algorithms.
Creators start newsletters every day
16% of creators plan to start a newsletter this year to grow their business, and they’ll be in good company. 644,814 creators used Kit to connect with their audiences last year.
If you want to join the growing community of creators, you don’t need a big investment upfront.
Hobbyists and part-time creators were the most likely to spend under $100 a month.
Creators send 902 emails every second
The number of creators starting an email list is impressive. But the amount of emails the collective creator economy sends is mind-boggling.
Kit creators sent 28,456,533,134 emails in 2023, equivalent to 902 every second.
Email marketing momentum in the creator economy has escalated over the past few years, but this is a new all-time high.
Kit creators sent 530 emails every second in 2021 and 689 per second in 2022—that’s a 70% increase in sending volume in just three years!
In the time it took you to read the previous sentence, thousands of emails went out to audiences around the globe across every niche.
Creators are committed to growing their email lists
Every subscriber is an opportunity to connect, learn, and share. Kit creators gained 230,721,331 new subscribers last year, equivalent to 438 subscribers signing up via opt-in forms every minute.
The average opt-in rate is 4%
Conversion rates for landing pages and newsletter sign-ups vary between industries and audiences, but the average is around 4%.
Lead magnets, such as the free business checklists Daphnee Lagredelle used to get her first 2,000 subscribers, are great ways to grow your email list.
However, creating a high-converting email form can take time.
Scott Keller’s first form only had a 0.1% conversion rate. So Scott returned to the drawing board and updated his strategy, resulting in a 3% conversion rate of website visitors to email subscribers.
Scott’s strategy is the perfect example of why you should focus on improving your own performance instead of worrying too much about how it compares to everyone else. A small change that makes a big impact is a win.
Growing an audience takes time, and more creators start each day
Don’t worry if growing your email list is a slow and steady process—you’re in great company. 30% of writers, authors, or journalists have built an audience for over 5 years.
But we’re excited to see hard work pay off in the years to come as even more creators start their journey— 47% of creators have been building their audience for less than 2 years.
Creators added more than 3 million subscribers through Recommendations
Community over competition is a powerful mindset and list-growth strategy.
Since launching, 5,856 creators joined Kit’s Creator Network, which lets you recommend and be recommended by other creators to grow your newsletter together.
And it seems to be working. Kit creators added 3,043,588 new subscribers to their lists with Recommendations through the Creator Network.
Sinem Günel is a multi-6-figure writer who has grown her business without spending a penny on ads. Sinem felt stuck around the 8,000 subscriber mark and turned to the Creator Network and Recommendations to work toward her goal of 10,000 subscribers.
Connecting with your audience boosts creator email performance
There’s more to email marketing than growing your list. Audience engagement helps with technical details like deliverability, but it’s also rewarding.
Email lets you have direct conversations in a way that social media might not, and it gets to be a place that benefits your audience and you. Chris Howes shared,
I say to my coaching clients, whether in their music practice or their business, “Your vision statement must include both the things you want to receive and the things you want to contribute.”
– Chris Howes
The average email open rate is 44%
The email subject line is your opportunity to catch subscriber attention in the inbox, and creators are finding ways to be even more engaging this year than last.
Kit creators have an average email open rate of 44%, higher than the 2023 average of 43% and the 2022 average open rate of 36%. That means that almost half of everyone who receives an email opens it.
The average click-through rate is 3.7%
Once a subscriber opens your email, you want them to enjoy it. The click-through rate is one way to measure your email’s effectiveness since it counts what percent of people follow the links in your message.
Kit creators have an average email click-through rate of 3.7%.
Another way to gauge subscriber enjoyment is your unsubscribe rate, which measures how many people leave your email list. The average email unsubscribe rate is 0.5% for Kit creators.
And while a small amount of unsubscribes is healthy and helps with email list hygiene, you’ll want to ask subscribers what’s bothering them if your unsubscribe rate suddenly jumps up.
Of course, some of the most valuable feedback isn’t a percentage. Kit’s own Creative Director and YouTube designer Charli Prangley shared,
That’s how I judge the success of a newsletter really – not by its open rate or clicks or things like that. It’s like, “Okay, did something I say prompt someone to reply?” Even if it’s nothing more than like, “I really enjoyed this.” It takes effort to reply to a newsletter more than giving a like on Instagram. So if someone wanted to do that, that means that it struck the right note. Keeps me going.
– Charli Prangley
Kit’s delivery rate is 99.8%
Email deliverability measures how often your emails make it to your subscriber’s inboxes instead of the spam folder.
Many factors impact deliverability, like your IP address and email content. However, you can consider it a measure of how reputable and reliable inbox service providers think your emails are.
Kit’s system-wide email delivery rate is 99.8%. That means that nearly every email makes it to subscriber inboxes. That’s partly due to the high-quality content creators send—the average spam report rate is 0.01%.
Another factor that influences your deliverability is your email service provider. Dan Go runs a successful fitness coaching and course business, but he noticed that deliverability and open rates were dropping.
So, he switched to Kit and saw deliverability improvements in just a week and rocketed his open rates from 20% to 52%.
More than 50,000 creators used over 13,000 email automation templates
Creators like Stacey Langford use email automations to create subscriber relationships and drive sales without spending all of their time managing emails.
Stacey uses a combination of email automation and weekly newsletters to consistently grow her business and keep marketing running even when she’s tending to her farm.
Using an automated welcome sequence for onboarding, and then writing consistently each week, has allowed my tiny family farm to grow from 25-50% year-over-year for every year we’ve used it.
– Stacey Langford
In 2023, 51,741 Kit creators used email automations to connect with their audiences, and some even saved time during set up by using 13,764 visual automation templates from the Kit library.
Jay Clouse is another creator who uses automations to grow his creator business. When Jay joined Kit, he had 1,800 email subscribers.
Now, he has more than 50,000 thanks to what he describes as flywheels, which he describes as “a process or phenomenon where every successive effort of doing a thing gets easier over time. It’s something that might take a while to get turning, might be hard in the beginning, but gets easier and spins faster over time.”
Jay uses a subscriber growth flywheel that combines the Kit’s Recommendations and Sparkloop’s Partner Program, plus a revenue flywheel with an automated welcome sequence that led to some of Jay’s highest months ever in digital product sales.
Growing income is a top priority, and there are plenty of ways to add new income streams
This year, income is the top priority across the entire creator community, with 1/3rd of all creators focusing on income growth.
The ways that creators earn money online are as diverse as the creators themselves, and many have multiple income streams. For example, Tori Mistick’s revenue consists of course sales, sponsored content, ads & affiliates, guest speaking, and a shop.
More creators made money this year
While a creator business isn’t a guaranteed ticket to overnight success, more creators made an income last year than the previous. 76% of creators made income last year, a 15% increase from our first State of the Creator Economy survey.
A fresh crop of creators are still laying the foundation for their business, with 55% of creators making less than $10,000 last year. But there is a creator middle class who make more than that—20% of creators made more than $60,000 last year, and 12% of creators made more than $100,000 from their business last year.
Creators are optimistic about the future, too. Collectively, almost 50% of creators made more income last year than the previous and almost 80% of creators expect to make more from their creator business this year.
Collectively, creators made $11 million through Kit Commerce
Kit Commerce is an easy way for creators to sell digital products and collect payment from customers.
After Kit Commerce launched, it took two years for creators to collectively make $10 million dollars, which was an exciting milestone.
Since then, the creator economy has kicked it up a notch. In 2023, creators collectively made $11,221,288 using Kit Commerce.
Kit Creators made over 21,000 new products last year
In 2023, Kit Commerce creators made 21,073 new products, which is a 27% increase from the previous year. We expect to see that number keep climbing higher, since 25% of creators plan to incorporate digital products as a new income stream this year.
One-time payment products are the most popular digital item
Digital offerings and payment structures come in all shapes and sizes, but one-time payments are far and away the most popular. 57% of all Kit Commerce transactions were one-time payments, and the collective sales value for these products was twice as much as the next most common payment type.
The second-most common product pricing structure last year was recurring payments, like for paid newsletters or communities. Artist Danny Gregory makes $45,000 a year from his paid newsletter with 600 subscribers.
Paid recommendations are a new creator income stream
Remember how we mentioned creators added 3 million new subscribers last year from Recommendations? Lifting up your fellow creators can earn you money, too!
Paid recommendations through Kit let you earn a commission each time one of your subscribers joins a newsletter you recommend. So far, creators have earned $359,224.37 for recommending other newsletters to their audiences.
Sponsors paid creators more than a million dollars last year
Sponsorships have been a potential income stream for creators for a while now, but finding brands and managing deals take a bit of work.
The Kit Sponsor Network makes earning money from sponsors easy by managing advertiser relationships for you. So far, creators have earned $1,463,541 of gross revenue through the Kit Sponsor Network.
Mark Manson, a New York Times bestselling author, generates $15,000 a month in passive income from brand sponsorships.
Mark noticed audience engagement shifting from his website to his social channels over time, sharing, “I realized I needed to start pivoting my business to monetizing through email and social directly.” Now, the Sponsor Network drives revenue without a lot of hands-on effort.
It’s easy. Brand deals come to you. There’s little to no back and forth. No headaches or long email chains.
– Mark Manson
How to use email stats to support your creator business
Email marketing stats give you more information to understand how you want to shape the future of your business and decide which data matters most to your goals.
Here are a few ways you can use email stats to make decisions and grow your business:
Decide which types of content to keep creating. Comparing the engagement rates on emails that promote different types of content signals what your audience is interested in. If you’re burning yourself out creating social media, blogs, videos, ebooks, and webinars, you might be able to cut the underperformers.
Stand out to sponsors, partners, and media outlets. A large email list doesn’t automatically mean a profitable one; a small email list isn’t automatically unappealing to sponsors. Including engagement metrics in your pitch to sponsors, investors, or the media can help you add an income stream.
Learn about your audience. Authentic connection with your audience is non-negotiable if you want to grow a sustainable creator business. Surveying your audience, comparing engagement across topics, and reviewing subscriber scoring help you find and learn about your most engaged subscribers.
Combine strategies and tools. Every piece of your creator toolkit—from your social media channels to your email list, paid content, and beyond—plays a role in your audience’s experience and growing your business. When you use email marketing stats to realize what email does well and what inspires your audience, you can combine it with your other efforts to use each channel for what it does best.
For example, Ali Abdaal uses his YouTube channel to connect with a wide audience and then creates a lead magnet for each video to grow his email list.
Once new subscribers are on the list, he and his team use segmentation and automations to nurture the relationship and make sales.
Rather than pitching products directly from his YouTube (which the algorithm doesn’t always like), he uses social media for exposure and sharing content and then email marketing for engagement and sales.
Steph Knapp is a freelance B2B + SaaS content marketer that loves educating and empowering curious humans. When she's not typing away, you'll find her volunteering at the animal shelter and obsessing over a new hobby every week. She shares marketing, freelance, and cat content on Twitter @ hellostephknapp. (Read more by Steph)
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