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Email marketing, by the numbers

Fashion & Apparel: how these brands actually email

Inbox Archive detects the email service provider, tracking and personalization tech, and campaign type behind every email it stores. Across 34 brands and 1,109 real campaigns, here is what the stack and tactics actually look like, measured from live sends and updated as new mail lands (current as of September 11, 2026).

Which email service providers brands actually use

Klaviyo is the most-used ESP among archived brands: 12 of 34 (35%) send with it. A brand can appear under more than one provider when it sends from several.

Share of campaigns by ESP

  • Klaviyo 35%
  • Mailgun 24%
  • SparkPost 16%
  • Salesforce Marketing Cloud 10%
  • Braze 8%
  • SendGrid 3%
  • Other 4%

Brands using each provider

Klaviyo 12 brands · 35%
Salesforce Marketing Cloud 5 brands · 15%
Mailgun 4 brands · 12%
SendGrid 4 brands · 12%
Braze 3 brands · 9%
SparkPost 2 brands · 6%
Sailthru 2 brands · 6%
Brevo 2 brands · 6%
Oracle Responsys 1 brands · 3%

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, 65% of brands do. The most popular label is email. (as in email.brand.com), chosen by 18% of subdomain senders. Measured across 34 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

A subdomain of their site (email.brand.com)
22 brands · 65%
The website domain itself (brand.com)
8 brands · 24%
A separate domain entirely (brand-email.com)
5 brands · 15%

Most common subdomain labels

email. 4 brands · 165 campaigns
e. 3 brands · 58 campaigns
news. 3 brands · 42 campaigns
em. 2 brands · 126 campaigns
emails. 2 brands · 69 campaigns
info. 2 brands · 34 campaigns
mail. 1 brands · 93 campaigns
na. 1 brands · 33 campaigns
news-na. 1 brands · 33 campaigns
s. 1 brands · 27 campaigns

Tracking & personalization tech

Beyond the sending ESP, LiveClicker is the most common add-on layer, found in emails from 4 brands.

LiveClicker 4 brands · Personalization
Monetate 2 brands · Analytics
Validity Everest 2 brands · Analytics
Wunderkind 2 brands · Personalization
Litmus 1 brands · Analytics
250ok 1 brands · Analytics

What brands actually send

The most common campaign type is Promotions & Sales (38% of all campaigns).

Promotions & Sales 38% · 420 campaigns
Other 22% · 241 campaigns
Product Launches 19% · 212 campaigns
Product Showcase 14% · 150 campaigns
Welcome & Onboarding 3% · 31 campaigns
Holiday & Seasonal 2% · 24 campaigns
Newsletters 2% · 18 campaigns
Transactional 0% · 5 campaigns
Abandoned Cart 0% · 2 campaigns
Announcements 0% · 2 campaigns
Events & Webinars 0% · 2 campaigns
Surveys & Feedback 0% · 2 campaigns

Tactics & techniques

2% of campaigns carry a promo code (21 campaigns from 8 brands). How often each rendering technique shows up:

Dynamic / open-time content
4%
A dark-mode variant
12%
Animated GIFs
35%
A promo code
2%

How brands handle unsubscribes

100% 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; 0% (5 campaigns) go out without one. 98% support one-click unsubscribe (RFC 8058, an https link plus a List-Unsubscribe-Post header), which Gmail and Yahoo have required of bulk senders since 2024.

Carry List-Unsubscribe
100%
Support one-click unsubscribe
98%
No unsubscribe header at all
0%
Brands that always include it
88%

Of the campaigns that carry the header, 76% offer both a link and a mailto address, 24% a link only, and 0% a mailto address only.

When brands hit send

Tue is the busiest day (17% of campaigns) and Sat the quietest (12%). The single most common hour to send is 12pm. Times are US Eastern. Counts 1,071 scheduled campaigns: welcome, cart and order emails are left out here, because they go out when a subscriber acts rather than when the brand chooses to send.

Day of week

Hour of day (US Eastern)

12am6am12pm6pm11pm

How often brands send

The typical brand sends 3.6 campaigns a week, measured across 32 brands with a long enough run of mail to judge.

What subject lines look like

The median subject runs 29 characters across 5 words, and 13% carry at least one emoji.

Median length
29 chars
Median words
5
40 chars or under
81%
With an emoji
13%

Most-used words

off 256 subjects
new 181 subjects
sale 100 subjects
styles 66 subjects
summer 65 subjects
fall 62 subjects
denim 55 subjects
deals 50 subjects
select 40 subjects
extra 40 subjects
clearance 34 subjects
shop 30 subjects

Most-used emoji

  • 17
  • 💸 10
  • 9
  • 8
  • 😍 7
  • 👀 7
  • 🚨 7
  • 💙 6
  • 6
  • 👏 6

How much is actually in an email

The median campaign carries 172 words of copy and 16 images, measured across 1,109 campaigns.

Median words of copy
172
Median images
16

How this is measured

Every figure comes from real emails captured in Inbox Archive, not surveys. 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 itself. Sending domains come from the From address of each campaign, compared against the brand's own website. Unsubscribe figures read the List-Unsubscribe and List-Unsubscribe-Post headers of each message as it arrived. Figures cover 1,109 published campaigns from 34 brands sent between Jul 2026 and Sep 2026, and refresh as new mail is archived. Browse the underlying data by provider, tracking tech, or campaign type.