Food & Drink: how these brands actually email
Every figure below is counted from real emails in the archive, not a survey: 854 campaigns from 23 brands, updated as new mail lands.
Key findings
- Brands send most on Thursday (16% of sends), and at 8am ET (20%). Details: Best time to send
- The median subject line is 40 characters; 33% carry an emoji. Details: Subject lines
- The most common campaign type is Promotions & Sales, 69% of all sends. Details: Campaign mix
- 10% of campaigns carry a promo code. Details: Tactics
- Klaviyo is the most-used email provider, at 74% of brands. Details: Email providers
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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 (16% of sends) and Saturday the quietest (12%). 8am is the most common hour to send (20%). Times are US Eastern. The typical brand sends 3.6 campaigns a week, across 18 brands with a long enough run of mail to judge. Each of the 22 brands counts equally, whatever its volume, across 818 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 | 129 | 15% |
| Tuesday | 114 | 15% |
| Wednesday | 126 | 16% |
| Thursday | 130 | 16% |
| Friday | 120 | 13% |
| Saturday | 89 | 12% |
| Sunday | 110 | 14% |
Hour of day (US Eastern)
Show hours as a tableHide the hours table
| Hour (US Eastern) | Campaigns | Share |
|---|---|---|
| 12am | 4 | 1% |
| 1am | 1 | 0% |
| 2am | 3 | 1% |
| 3am | 1 | 0% |
| 4am | 0 | 0% |
| 5am | 7 | 0% |
| 6am | 13 | 1% |
| 7am | 45 | 1% |
| 8am | 183 | 20% |
| 9am | 145 | 9% |
| 10am | 41 | 5% |
| 11am | 39 | 10% |
| 12pm | 50 | 17% |
| 1pm | 17 | 2% |
| 2pm | 62 | 4% |
| 3pm | 64 | 8% |
| 4pm | 24 | 3% |
| 5pm | 23 | 4% |
| 6pm | 8 | 1% |
| 7pm | 9 | 1% |
| 8pm | 33 | 5% |
| 9pm | 41 | 7% |
| 10pm | 1 | 0% |
| 11pm | 4 | 0% |
What subject lines look like
The median subject runs 40 characters across 8 words, and 33% carry at least one emoji.
- Median length
- 40 chars
- Median words
- 8
- 40 characters or under
- 51%
- With an emoji
- 33%
Most-used words (every campaign type, brand names left out; each opens the campaigns that use it)
Most-used emoji
- 🚨 25 subjects
- ☀ 14 subjects
- ⚡ 12 subjects
- 🎉 11 subjects
- 🍂 11 subjects
- 🍁 11 subjects
- 👀 9 subjects
- 🐟 9 subjects
- 🔥 8 subjects
- 👏 8 subjects
What brands actually send
The most common campaign type is Promotions & Sales (69% of all campaigns). Each type opens its examples.
Tactics and techniques
10% of campaigns carry a promo code (88 campaigns from 10 brands). See the live codes. How often each rendering technique shows up:
- Dynamic / open-time content
- 0%
- A dark-mode variant See examples
- 15%
- Animated GIFs See examples
- 20%
How much is actually in an email
The median campaign carries 170 words of copy and 9 images, measured across 854 campaigns.
- Median words of copy
- 170
- Median images
- 9
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: 17 of 23 brands (74%) send with it. A brand can appear under more than one provider when it sends from several.
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, 26% of brands do. The most popular labels are promotional., p., e., ak., email., news. and transactional., tied at 17% of subdomain senders each. Measured across 23 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,
37% of campaigns left from SendGrid's network.
45% of campaigns came from a server named after the brand
rather than its provider.
Measured across 854 campaigns from
23 brands; the network is whoever announces the sending IP's route.
Share of campaigns by sending network
Whose name is on the sending server
6 brands (26%) 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 Salesforce Marketing Cloud and Emarsys.
Mail server software, where the headers name it
-
Momentum 200 campaigns · 2 brands
5.3.0 ×155 5.2.0 ×45
-
PowerMTA 106 campaigns · 1 brand
36% of campaigns carry a hop that names its software; SendGrid's and Mailgun's internal hops, for example, never say.
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% (0 campaigns) go out without one.
100% support one-click unsubscribe (RFC 8058), which Gmail and Yahoo
have required of bulk senders since 2024.
- Campaigns with List-Unsubscribe
- 100%
- Campaigns with one-click unsubscribe
- 100%
- Brands that always include it
- 100%
Of the campaigns that carry the header, 63% offer both a link and a mailto address, 37% 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 854 published campaigns from 23 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.