E-commerce & Retail: how these brands actually email
Every figure below is counted from real emails in the archive, not a survey: 1,356 campaigns from 38 brands, updated as new mail lands.
Key findings
- Brands send most on Thursday (18% of sends), and at 9am ET (10%). Details: Best time to send
- The median subject line is 33 characters; 40% carry an emoji. Details: Subject lines
- The most common campaign type is Promotions & Sales, 45% of all sends. Details: Campaign mix
- 7% of campaigns carry a promo code. Details: Tactics
- Klaviyo is the most-used email provider, at 47% of brands. Details: Email providers
Jump to a section
The best time to send, by when brands actually send
This is when brands send most, not proof those times perform best. Thursday is the busiest day (18% of sends) and Sunday the quietest (11%). 9am is the most common hour to send (10%). Times are US Eastern. The typical brand sends 3.4 campaigns a week, across 34 brands with a long enough run of mail to judge. Each of the 35 brands counts equally, whatever its volume, across 1,270 scheduled campaigns; welcome, cart and order emails are left out, because they go out when a subscriber acts rather than when the brand chooses to send.
Day of week
Show days as a tableHide the days table
| Day | Campaigns | Share |
|---|---|---|
| Monday | 205 | 15% |
| Tuesday | 185 | 16% |
| Wednesday | 196 | 15% |
| Thursday | 213 | 18% |
| Friday | 180 | 14% |
| Saturday | 142 | 11% |
| Sunday | 149 | 11% |
Hour of day (US Eastern)
Show hours as a tableHide the hours table
| Hour (US Eastern) | Campaigns | Share |
|---|---|---|
| 12am | 19 | 2% |
| 1am | 5 | 0% |
| 2am | 5 | 0% |
| 3am | 17 | 2% |
| 4am | 15 | 2% |
| 5am | 17 | 2% |
| 6am | 45 | 4% |
| 7am | 15 | 2% |
| 8am | 101 | 7% |
| 9am | 131 | 10% |
| 10am | 62 | 7% |
| 11am | 63 | 7% |
| 12pm | 117 | 10% |
| 1pm | 144 | 8% |
| 2pm | 99 | 9% |
| 3pm | 114 | 6% |
| 4pm | 33 | 2% |
| 5pm | 39 | 3% |
| 6pm | 21 | 1% |
| 7pm | 105 | 6% |
| 8pm | 59 | 4% |
| 9pm | 8 | 0% |
| 10pm | 20 | 3% |
| 11pm | 16 | 2% |
What subject lines look like
The median subject runs 33 characters across 6 words, and 40% carry at least one emoji.
- Median length
- 33 chars
- Median words
- 6
- 40 characters or under
- 74%
- With an emoji
- 40%
Most-used words (every campaign type, brand names left out; each opens the campaigns that use it)
Most-used emoji
- 🚨 38 subjects
- ⚡ 36 subjects
- 🍂 31 subjects
- 🔥 31 subjects
- 👀 30 subjects
- ✨ 23 subjects
- 🎁 16 subjects
- 😍 14 subjects
- 🎉 13 subjects
- 👉 10 subjects
What brands actually send
The most common campaign type is Promotions & Sales (45% of all campaigns). Each type opens its examples.
Tactics and techniques
7% of campaigns carry a promo code (99 campaigns from 16 brands). See the live codes. How often each rendering technique shows up:
- Dynamic / open-time content See examples
- 7%
- A dark-mode variant See examples
- 9%
- Animated GIFs See examples
- 26%
How much is actually in an email
The median campaign carries 161 words of copy and 15 images, measured across 1,356 campaigns.
- Median words of copy
- 161
- Median images
- 15
The sending stack
For deliverability and email operations: the providers, tracking tools, domains and networks behind these campaigns. Writing copy? You can stop here and browse the campaigns.
Which email service providers brands actually use
Klaviyo is the most-used ESP among archived brands: 18 of 38 brands (47%) send with it. A brand can appear under more than one provider when it sends from several.
Share of campaigns by ESP
- Klaviyo 53%
- SendGrid 19%
- Iterable 12%
- Salesforce Marketing Cloud 5%
- Emarsys 4%
- Braze 3%
- Other 4%
Brands using each provider
Which domain the mail actually comes from
Deliverability guides tell brands to send marketing from a dedicated subdomain rather than their root domain. In practice, 39% of brands do. The most popular label is email. (as in email.brand.com), chosen by 20% of subdomain senders. Measured across 38 brands with a known website; a brand can appear under more than one style when it sends from several domains.
What the From address sits on
Most common subdomain labels
Which network actually delivers the mail
The platform a brand logs into is not always the one whose servers hand the mail over.
Reading each campaign's Received headers,
64% of campaigns left from SendGrid's network.
Iterable mail left from Mailgun (56%)
and SparkPost (44%).
42% of campaigns came from a server named after the brand
rather than its provider.
Measured across 1,356 campaigns from
38 brands; the network is whoever announces the sending IP's route.
Share of campaigns by sending network
Whose name is on the sending server
17 brands (45%) sent at least one campaign from a server carrying their own domain, usually a sign of dedicated IPs.
Platforms that deliver over someone else's network
A cloud network (AWS, Azure, Google Cloud) means the platform runs its own mail servers on rented machines. Not shown: platforms that deliver entirely from their own network, such as SendGrid, Salesforce Marketing Cloud, Emarsys and Oracle Responsys.
Mail server software, where the headers name it
-
Momentum 130 campaigns · 8 brands
5.3.0 ×120 5.2.0 ×10
-
PowerMTA 109 campaigns · 3 brands
18% of campaigns carry a hop that names its software; SendGrid's and Mailgun's internal hops, for example, never say.
How brands handle unsubscribes
99% of campaigns carry a List-Unsubscribe header,
the one that lets Gmail, Apple Mail and Yahoo show an unsubscribe button next to the sender's name;
1% (17 campaigns) go out without one.
99% support one-click unsubscribe (RFC 8058), which Gmail and Yahoo
have required of bulk senders since 2024.
2 brands (5%) never include it in any campaign.
- Campaigns with List-Unsubscribe
- 99%
- Campaigns with one-click unsubscribe
- 99%
- Brands that always include it
- 95%
Of the campaigns that carry the header, 54% offer both a link and a mailto address, 46% a link only, and 0% a mailto address only.
See the campaigns behind the numbers
Every figure here is counted from emails you can open, read as text, and inspect header by header.
How this is measured
Every figure comes from real emails captured in Inbox Archive, not surveys. Send times come from each message's Date header, converted to US Eastern, with each brand weighted equally; welcome, cart and order emails are left out of them. Subject-line words are counted across every subject, leaving out common words and brand names. Cadence is each brand's campaigns per week over the span it has been archived, for brands with at least three campaigns over two weeks.
The ESP is detected from message headers and sending infrastructure; tracking and personalization tech from asset and click domains in the HTML; campaign type and promo codes from the email content. Sending domains come from each campaign's From address, compared against the brand's own website. Unsubscribe figures read the List-Unsubscribe headers as each message arrived. Sending networks come from the outbound IP in the Received headers, attributed to the network that announces its route (via Team Cymru's IP-to-ASN service).
Figures cover 1,356 published campaigns from 38 brands sent between Jul 2026 and Oct 2026. A section only appears once it covers at least 10 brands and 50 campaigns. Browse the data by provider, tracking tech, or campaign type.