140+ Eye-Opening Digital Marketing Statistics for 2021!

Looking for a comprehensive source of digital marketing statistics?

Perhaps you’re crafting a digital marketing strategy for the first time and need an overview of what to consider.

Or, you’re a marketer who knows that keeping up with trends in terms of digital marketing industry growth is key to your success.

Maybe you’re not even sure what digital marketing statistics are!

Whatever your motivation, this list of eye-opening digital marketing stats (2021 edition) will deliver.

What is Digital Marketing?

The main difference between traditional and digital marketing is the medium used to connect with your audience.

In traditional marketing, this would include magazines, newspapers, and television. Digital marketers are working with electronic devices or the internet.

More specifically, the channels that deliver digital marketing messages include search engines, email, mobile apps, websites, and social media platforms.

As the global use of the internet and electronic devices continues to grow, digital marketing is basically mandatory if you want to reach your customers where they are spending their time.

So, how important are digital marketing statistics in 2021?

Growth rates of digital marketing continue to increase. Everyone wants to get it right but there are so many opinions out there that it can be challenging to cut through the noise.

Staying focused on research and data helps marketers make better decisions and businesses get more value out of their marketing spend.

Benefits of Digital Marketing

So, how effective is digital marketing anyway?

Digital marketing offers many benefits over traditional approaches.

It’s cheaper than traditional marketing and has impressive ROIs, assuming it’s done correctly. Digital marketing focuses efforts where people already spend their time online and is scalable to reach a huge audience without incurring additional costs.

It has a global reach and makes it possible to share products or services with a massive audience around the world.

Given the electronic nature of digital marketing campaigns, they are trackable and analytics tools give instant feedback on how campaigns are performing. You can make real-time adjustments on the fly, again, without incurring additional cost.

Take the example of a landing page versus a traditional pamphlet for getting the message out about a new product or service.

With the pamphlet, you better be certain that your message is on point before it’s published! Once you print 10,000 copies, it’s expensive and difficult to change your visuals or wording if they aren’t connecting, or worse, you get negative feedback.

With a landing page, you simply go into the back end system, update an image or text, save, and hit publish. You can track metrics before and after the change to determine if they had the desired result.

It’s also becoming a necessity in terms of keeping up with the competition and offers endless options for personalizing messages for different segments of your customer base.

Email Marketing Statistics

Email has been around for a long time but our daily habits still center around email. Email marketing is the (active) use of a customer email list to build relationships and inform customers about new products, services, or discounts.

Why is this a super smart way to market? Consider these stats:

1. An astounding 90.3% of people in the U.S. use email.
2. 251.8 million U.S. internet users send at least one email per month.
3. Globally, the number of email users is 4 billion and is projected to increase to 4.6 billion in 2025.
4. 306.4 billion emails are sent globally each day and this is projected to increase to over 376.4 billion by 2025.
5. 99% of email users check their email every day....kind of mind-blowing, right?
6. 58% of users check email before doing anything else online.
7. Over 3 million emails are currently sent per second.

What else do you need to know?

1. 61% of consumers prefer to be contacted by brands through email.
2. Email marketing offers a staggering potential return on investment of up to 4400%.
3. Email marketing is the key strategic channel according to 91% of marketers.
4. Objectives for email marketing campaigns include sales (62%), engagement (50%), brand awareness (47%), and building loyalty (45%).

Email marketing is so powerful that positioning it as the center of your marketing strategy just makes sense.

Social Media Marketing Statistics

Social media marketing is close in strategic importance to email marketing but, with a lot of different platforms requiring different approaches, it is more complex to action.

General Social Media Statistics

Using a social media platform to market your products and services  is powerful:

1. 83% of marketers ranked social media as an important channel.
2. Active social media users grew by 9% in 2019.
3. Worldwide, people spend an average of 2 hours 16 minutes using social media.
4. Social media users have accounts on 8.9 social media platforms.
5. 86% of consumers buying IT products use social media to make a decision.

It can also have a big impact on sales team performance:

1. Surprisingly, about ⅔ of companies do not have a social media strategy for sales teams.
2. 78% of salespeople using social media perform better than their peers.
3. IBM increased its sales by an impressive 400% thanks to its inbound social selling program.
4. 98% of sales reps with at least 5,000 LinkedIn contacts reach or surpass their sales quota.

Facebook

Facebook offers digital marketers opportunities to share organic posts and to purchase highly targeted paid advertisements. In terms of social media platforms, Facebook dominates:

1. The fastest-growing demographic on Google + and Facebook is 45-54-year-olds.
2. Facebook leads in active user accounts, with 2.271 billion, an increase of 27 million users.
3. Facebook reports that an incredible 2.121 billion people can be reached with Facebook ads.
4. 35% of adults 13+ can be reached by advertising on Facebook.
5. The ‘typical’ Facebook user clicks on an advert (any format) on Facebook an average of 8 times per month.
6. 51% of Facebook fans are more likely to buy the brands they fan.

Instagram

Instagram is the most popular visual marketing platform and is particularly well suited for businesses that are targeting Millennials:

1. 33% of social media users use Instagram discount codes.
2. Instagram has a total of 1 billion active user accounts.
3. Active users on Instagram increased by 38 million.
4. Instagram’s addressable advertising audience, compared to the population aged 13+, is 15%.
5. 59% of Millennials in the U.S. are Instagram users.
6. Astonishingly, over 1,000 Instagram photos are posted per second.

LinkedIn

LinkedIn is particularly useful for building your brand and credibility. It’s also a great place for a B2B marketer to advertise and typically yields high-quality leads.

1. LinkedIn has a total of 303 million active user accounts.
2. LinkedIn’s addressable advertising audience, compared to the population aged 13+, is 11%.

Twitter

Twitter is a great testing ground for messaging as it allows you to target a very select audience and provides detailed analytics on campaign results.

1. Twitter has a total of 326 million active user accounts.
2. Active users on Twitter increased by 9 million.
3. Remarkably, over 9,500 Tweets are sent every second.
4. 79% of Twitter followers are more likely to recommend the brands they follow.
5. 42% of companies have acquired a customer through Twitter.

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) Statistics

SEO organically optimizes your website to get better traffic and visibility, conversions, and ROI. This involves doing keyword research, ensuring your site and (high quality) content have these keywords in the right place.

1. SEO dominates as the source of trackable web traffic at 53%.
2. Google currently holds over 92% of the worldwide search engine market share.
3. Over 93,000 google searches happen per second.
4. An unbelievable 80% of purchases start online, even if they end in-store.
5. 70% of businesses surveyed by databox confirmed that SEO generates more sales than Pay Per Click (PPC).
6. Improving SEO and organic presence is a top inbound marketing priority for 61% of marketers.

Content Marketing Statistics

Content marketing is a useful strategy that involves creating and sharing content online that doesn’t explicitly promote a brand but is intended to generate interest in its product or service.

Its main goal is to build customer engagement and it shouldn’t feel overly “salesy”.

1. More than half of all Internet users read blogs at least monthly.
2. U.S. Internet users spend 3 times more minutes on blogs and social networks than on email.
3. More than ⅓ of U.S. companies use blogs for marketing purposes.
4. Companies that blog get an impressive 55% more website visitors.
5. 57% of businesses have acquired a customer through their blog.
6. ⅔ of marketers say their company blog is “critical” or “important” to their business.

SEM (Search Engine Marketing) Statistics

Similar to SEO, SEM is a digital marketing strategy that aims to increase the visibility of a website and drive more traffic to it. It is different from SEO as it includes paid search (or pay per click), rather than just organic actions.

1. Advertisers are expected to spend a staggering $99.22 billion on search in 2025.
2. Most of that will go to ads targeting mobile devices, with the share growing to around two-thirds by 2024.
3. Google’s ad revenue amounts to $146.92 billion, which accounts for the majority of Google’s $181.69 billion in total revenue.
4. Amazon’s ad revenues in the U.S. alone are $15.73 billion and are projected to be over 30 billion by 2023.
5. 69% of Google’s U.S. paid search click share is on mobile devices.
6. Digital marketing professionals that combine organic SEO and PPC ads see 25% more clicks and 27% greater profits when compared to results from just one technique.
7. Every $1 that a business spends on Google Search and Ads makes an incredible $8 in profit.

eCommerce Statistics

eCommerce is simply the act of buying (or selling) online, and it is big business!

1. 29% of people aged 15+ make online purchases and/or pay bills online.
2. 28% of women make online transactions.
3. 30% of men make online transactions.
4. A jaw-dropping 2.818 billion people purchased consumer goods via eCommerce.
5. 84% of internet users say they’ve searched online for a product or service to buy.
6. 91% visited an online retail store on the web from any device.
7. 75% purchased a product or service online from any device.
8. 42% made their online purchase using a laptop or desktop computer while 55% made an online purchase via a mobile device.
9. These purchases translate into major dollars, with $1.786 trillion in total annual sales revenue attributed to online purchases.

Conversion Rate Optimization Statistics

Conversion Rate Optimization is focused on increasing the percentage of users who perform a desired action on a website, such as filling in a form, adding something to a shopping cart, or signing up for a service.

1. Lead generation forms have an average of 11 fields and a conversion rate of 17% while contact forms with only 4 fields have conversion rates of only 1%.
2. The average conversion rate is 2.35%.
3. The top 25% of landing page conversion rates get 5.31% conversions; the top 10% get 11.45% or higher.
4. Despite the high prevalence of mobile use, about half of all current landing pages are not optimized for mobile.
5. Companies with 30 or more landing pages generate 7 times more leads than those with fewer than 10.
6. Only 38% of brands have more than six landing pages.
7. A 1-second delay in loading reduces your conversions by a depressing 7%.
8. One offer per page is critical; putting multiple offers on your landing page can decrease conversions by up to 266%.
9. 48% of marketers are building a new landing page for each campaign.
10. Landing pages asking for personal information have the worst conversion rates, while those asking for only email or phone convert the best.

Video Marketing Statistics

Video marketing is pretty self-explanatory; the use of visual content to promote and market what you’re selling.

This is one of the biggest shifts happening in digital marketing today as more and more customers are clicking on videos over other types of content.

1. Using video can improve landing page conversations by a whopping 85%.
2. U.S. adults spend 2 hours 13 minutes watching videos per day, up from 1 hour 46 minutes in 2019.
3. Businesses using video as a marketing tool have increased by 41% since 2016.
4. 86% of companies use video as a marketing tool.
5. The types of videos created are explainer videos (73%), social media videos (67%), presentation videos (51%), sales videos (41%), and video ads (41%).
6. 24% of video marketers said they used video for the first time in 2020.
7. 96% of people have watched an explainer video to learn more about a product or service.
8. 84% say they’ve been convinced to buy a product or service by watching a brand’s video.
9. 79% have been convinced to buy or download a piece of software or app by watching a video.
10. Remarkably, people are twice as likely to share video content with their friends than any other type of content, including social media posts, blog articles, and product pages.
11. 86% of video marketers say video has increased traffic to their website.
12. 53% of people want more video content in the future.

Mobile Marketing Statistics

Mobile marketing is a multi-channel strategy for reaching users on their tablets, smartphones, or other mobile devices.

This is critical as statistics show that consumers are spending more (and more) time on this type of device versus a laptop or desktop computer.

1. Mobile video advertising spending now totals $4.78 billion.
2. Mobile search advertising spend is even more at $29.06 billion.
3. Total mobile ad spending in the U.S. is $120 billion.
4. Worldwide mobile ad spend is a whopping $199 billion.
5. 18.5% of marketing budgets are devoted to mobile marketing in the U.S.
6. The country with the highest growth in mobile ad spend is China.
7. Mobile social media users grew by 10%.
8. Active mobile internet users total 3.986 billion (52% of the population).
9. A striking 55% of internet users bought something online via a mobile phone in the past month.
10. 46% of opens were on mobile devices.
11. 56% of emails get read on iPhones or in Gmail.

B2B (Business to Business) Marketing Statistics

B2B marketing is the marketing of products and services to other businesses and organizations, rather than to end consumers. This distinction makes a big difference to your marketing strategy, as is shown by these statistics:

1. 77% of B2B purchasers said they would not speak to a salesperson until they did their own research.
2. In B2B, Combined Search (Organic and Paid) averages 76% of traffic.
3. B2B companies generate 2x more revenue from Organic search than any other channel.
4. 67% of B2C and 41% of B2B companies have acquired a customer through Facebook.
5. 60% of B2C marketers are using email compared to 38% of B2B.

Marketing Automation Statistics

Marketing automation refers to technology that is used to automatically manage multiple channels, messages, and campaigns. This involves sending customers automated messages by text, email, or social media based on a predefined action online.

1. Marketing technologies have a staggering global market value of $121.5 billion worldwide, $65.9 billion of this spend is concentrated in the UK and U.S.
2. Three-quarters of all companies use marketing automation.
3. Automated welcome emails sent by e-commerce players have an impressive conversion rate of 52.9 percent; for automated cart abandonment emails, the rate is about 33.89 percent.
4. Surprisingly, 36% of marketers planned to explore automation and Artificial Intelligence as a marketing and sales strategy.
5. Triggered emails, sent when a customer performs a specific action, have a 70.5% higher open rate and a 152% higher click-through rate than generic email newsletters.
6. 75% of email revenue is generated from personalized campaigns.
7. 63% of companies using marketing automation outperformed competitors.
8. Using chatbots can help save up to 30% of customer support costs.

Lead Nurturing Statistics

Lead nurturing, or the act of interaction with and building relationships with customers at every stage of the sales funnel (not just acquisition), is an often overlooked and powerful digital marketing strategy.

It includes tactics like personalized emails, multiple touches on various platforms (eg. text and email), leveraging targeted content, and ensuring timely follow-up on leads.

1. A dismal 80% of new leads never translate into sales.
2. Businesses that excel at lead nurturing generate 50% more sales-ready leads at a 33% lower cost.
3. 35% of B2B marketers have established a lead nurturing strategy.
4. 78% of marketers said that email was the most effective online channel for lead nurturing campaigns.
5. Nurtured leads make 47% larger purchases than non-nurtured leads.
6. 65% of businesses say generating traffic and leads is their biggest marketing challenge.
7. 74% of companies say that converting leads into buying customers is their top priority.
8. Outbound leads cost 39% more than inbound leads.
9. Perhaps surprisingly, 96% of visitors that come to your website aren’t ready to buy.
10. 68% of B2B companies will use landing pages to nurture new sales leads for future conversion.
11. 49% of businesses say most of their leads require “long cycle” nurturing with many influencers.
12. 51% of email marketers say email list segmentation is the most effective way to personalize lead nurturing.

Creative Marketing Statistics

Creative marketing is the artwork, design, visuals, and overall visual strategy that goes into a website or an ad.

1. 2 in 3 companies planned to expand their creative teams.
2. 69% of companies plan to increase the number of freelancers on staff.
3. Web and mobile development, user experience, creative development, visual design, digital marketing, and marketing strategy remain top areas for hire.
4. 51% of advertising and marketing managers say that losing a highly skilled team member unexpectedly would have a significant adverse impact on their business because they’d be hard to replace.
5. 45% said they would be stretched thin but could find a replacement quickly.
6. More than 60% of creative marketers managed more than four unique projects every week.
7. More than half of marketers lack a consistent process for the review and approval of their creative content.
8. Almost 4 in 5 marketers encountered regular issues with receiving feedback on their creative projects.
9. 78% of all marketing work is subject to at least one type of compliance.

FOMO (Fear of Missing Out) Statistics

FOMO is fear or another negative emotion that someone experiences when they perceive that everyone else is living a larger life, having more fun, or experiencing better things than they are.

1. Millennials experience FOMO more than any other age group; 69% experience FOMO.
2. Millennials overspend to avoid FOMO, with 40% overspending or going into debt to keep up with their friends.
3. 73% of Millenials who went into debt to keep up with their friends kept it a secret.
4. 27% of Millenials responded that they felt uncomfortable saying “no” when a friend suggested an activity they couldn’t afford.
5. The biggest things creating FOMO for Millenials are travel (59%), parties and events (56%), and food (29%).
6. Facebook is the most common contributor to FOMO at 72%, then Instagram (14%), Twitter (11%), and Pinterest (8%).
7. 56% of people are afraid of missing out on events, news, and important updates if they are away from social networks.
8. 27% of people head to social media right when they wake up.

What Will You Do With These Digital Marketing Statistics?

An effective digital marketing strategy offers huge benefits to a business, including increased ROI for your marketing spend, sales and revenue growth, and more satisfied and happy customers.

If you’re a business owner, this article should cause reflection on how your current approach to digital marketing is serving you.

Think you need an overhaul after reading this post? That’s ok, you’re not alone and now you’re well-armed with the information you need to do things better!

So stay inspired and don’t wait to take action on what you’ve learned today. The world of digital marketing moves lightning-fast and you don’t want to get left behind!