Jul 15, 2015
Major Email Provider Trends in 2015: Gmail’s Lead Increases
If you’re an email marketing historian and/or MailChimp blog superfan, you may remember our ongoing series of posts over the years about how much email we send to the major email clients. When we began tracking the stats in 2009, we first saw rapid growth from Yahoo! and Hotmail, with Gmail catching up and finally taking the lead in 2012.
It’s been a minute since we checked in, so we thought we’d take a look at how things look in 2015. We studied 81,697,711,897 emails and, uh, spoiler alert: Gmail is still hangin’ tough.
It’s not just that Gmail receives a ton more email from MailChimp than everyone else—they’re also growing faster. Gmail use is up 70% in the last year, as compared to AOL and Comcast’s 31%.
We’re also sending more emails than ever, so the raw numbers have grown quite a bit since last time. In July 2012, we studied 1,482,093,908 emails and found that Gmail beat Hotmail by more than 100 million. When we ran the numbers this June, the difference was closer to 1.8 billion. Whoa.
(Our disclaimers from that 2012 post still apply, of course: The data for Hotmail includes only hotmail.com, and doesn’t include live.com, outlook.com, or any of their foreign domains. Also absent are private domains powered by Google Apps.)
What does this mean for you? If you’re curious about your own user-agent trends, this article from our Knowledge Base will walk you though how to learn more about them (and so much more about your list). Since you’re most likely sending to a ton of Gmail users, here are some tips to help ensure your email is delivered to the Primary tab. And if you enjoy crunching numbers and applying those insights to your small business, check out our research page for plenty more where this came from.
Going forward, it’ll be interesting to see if Gmail can maintain its huge lead. Considering it lagged in third place just 6 years ago, who knows what the future holds. Whatever happens, we’ll keep you posted.
S K Prasad
You should also consider doing this for mobile apps. More people are reading the email on the go and data around which apps are getting the most views would be really helpful. Especially when testing for mobile.
07.17.2015
Ben
What happened in Feb 15?
07.19.2015
Omair MailChimp
Hi Ben,
Email volume generally peaks around the holidays, and slows down for a couple of months after that. What we’re seeing here is a seasonal slowdown in volume, similar to what we saw in this post from 2012:
http://blog.mailchimp.com/major-email-provider-trends-2012-gmail-pulls-ahead/
07.27.2015
Theodore Nwangene
I agree with you Omair,
I also believe that it is the best email provider out there today. You’ll hardly hear people talking about yahoo mail, hot mail and the rest of them.
Most of the people i know are all using Gmail and i really love their service.
I hope they will keep topping the chart anyway :).
Thanks for sharing.
07.25.2015
jason reynolds
Is this just based on the @domain or a client. I would be curious to know what clients are being used as well.
07.27.2015
Omair MailChimp
Hi Jason,
These numbers are based on domain. Clients would be interesting to look at (and you can see those stats for your MailChimp list! Check out the link below) but looking at clients requires a different set of data.
We have a domain for every address in our system, but only get information on clients for emails that were opened. For example, if we send to an address with a Gmail domain, it could end up in the recipient’s Apple Mail inbox. But unless the user opens the email, we won’t know that.
http://kb.mailchimp.com/lists/managing-subscribers/all-about-list-stats?#topemailclients
07.27.2015