Weekly List Cleaning Lifts Email Click Rates by Up to 41%
List cleaning, removing subscribers who never open or click, usually gets treated as occasional housekeeping rather than a real growth lever. Flodesk’s 2026 Email Marketing Trends Report found that senders who clean their list weekly saw up to 41% higher click rates and 31% fewer unsubscribes than senders who never clean their list at all. […]
Segmented Email Sends Get 4x the Opens and 3x the Clicks of Full-List Blasts
Full-list blasts are still the default for a lot of small email programs, since segmenting feels like extra setup for uncertain payoff. Flodesk’s 2026 Email Marketing Trends Report says that trade-off isn’t close: sends to a segmented list, a subset of subscribers grouped by behavior, source, or status rather than the full list, saw up […]
Only 7 of 70+ ‘Spam Trigger’ Phrases Actually Hurt Email Open Rates
For years, marketers have avoided a long, informal list of “spam trigger” words in subject lines, on the theory that certain phrases get emails buried in spam folders or blocklisted outright. Flodesk’s 2026 Email Marketing Trends Report tested more than 70 of these commonly blamed phrases against real open-rate data and found only seven actually […]
Emails Following the 80/20 Text Rule See 19% Lower Opens and 24% Fewer Clicks
Marketers have spent years designing emails around the 80/20 rule (no more than 20% images, the rest plain text), out of fear that image-heavy emails tank deliverability and get ignored. Flodesk’s 2026 Email Marketing Trends Report found the opposite: across more than 14 billion email deliveries, text-to-image ratio (the split between rendered image area and […]
Two-thirds of consumers buy based on influencer recommendations
Sprout Social’s 2026 influencer marketing report found that 66% of consumers made a purchase in the past year directly because of an influencer’s recommendation, and 29% did it ten times or more. Ask the marketers running those campaigns why they invest in influencer marketing, though, and only 24% point to direct sales or conversion; half […]
Marketers Who Track Blog Traffic Get Worse Results Than the Average
39% of content marketers primarily track volume metrics like traffic for their blog, according to Orbit Media’s 2026 Blogging Statistics survey. That group reports “strong results” just 11% of the time, below the 14% overall benchmark. Marketers who track conversions instead outperform it. Source 2026 Blogging Statistics, Orbit Media Studios, September 2026 · n = […]
Influencer Collaboration Is Blogging’s Best-Performing Tactic (and the Most Abandoned)
Influencer collaboration correlates with “strong results” at 2.6x the benchmark rate, the single strongest predictor of any strategy Orbit Media’s 2026 Blogging Statistics survey tracked. Only 7% of marketers still use it, down from 25% in 2017. Source 2026 Blogging Statistics, Orbit Media Studios, September 2026 · n = 1,042 What it means Of the […]
Marketers Using 6+ Blog Strategies Get Strong Results Almost 3x as Often
Marketers who use six or more of the eight strategies tracked in Orbit Media’s 2026 Blogging Statistics survey report “strong results” 39% of the time, versus just 4% for marketers using zero or one. That’s a 9x gap between the bottom and top tiers, and it comes from stacking tactics rather than finding one silver […]
92.4% of Marketers Use AI for Blogging But It Hasn’t Moved Their Results
92.4% of content marketers now use AI somewhere in their blogging process, per Orbit Media’s 2026 Blogging Statistics survey. Yet marketers who use AI and marketers who don’t report “strong results” at the exact same rate: 14% each. That’s near-universal adoption, and it hasn’t moved the number it was supposed to move. Source 2026 Blogging […]
The Lowest Blog Performance Rate in 12 Years: Just 13.9%
Only 13.9% of content marketers report “strong marketing results” from their blog in 2026, according to Orbit Media’s 13th annual Blogging Statistics survey. That’s the lowest figure the report has recorded in 12 years of tracking. For over a decade the number held steady in a 20-30% range, and it just broke out of it. […]