Blog

Small Business Marketing & CRM Statistics: Benchmarks Worth Citing

By Cole Carter, Founder · Updated August 17, 2026

Small business marketing statistics describe the measurable realities owners and operators face every week: how many hours go to marketing, how many tools the average company juggles, and what adoption looks like for email and CRM. This page collects a set of cited benchmarks for small business marketing, email, and CRM, each with its public source, plus a plain reading of what each number means for consolidating your stack into fewer tools. The goal is one reference you can cite with confidence.

How much time do small businesses lose to manual marketing tasks?

70% of small business owners spend fewer than five hours per week on marketing, even though most name it a growth driver. [Source: Fiverr, 2025]

Five hours a week is a thin budget, and it shrinks further when a share of it goes to manual upkeep: re-entering the same contact into an email tool, a CRM, and a spreadsheet, or rebuilding a campaign from scratch because last month's lives in a different system. Small business marketing automation is the most direct way to hand the repetitive parts to software and keep those hours for work that actually reaches customers.

How many small businesses use email marketing and what open rates do they see?

64% of small businesses use email marketing to reach customers. [Source: Campaign Monitor, 2021]

Across all industries, the average email open rate is 21.33%. [Source: Mailchimp, 2023]

Email is the most common channel in the small business mix, but an open rate of roughly 21% means most recipients do not open a given send. The gap between sending and being read is where email marketing and CRM software earns its keep: clean lists, sender reputation, and segmentation all move that number up.

How many tools does the typical small business run?

Small businesses with 50 or fewer employees use an average of 40 different SaaS applications. [Source: Blissfully, 2019]

The smallest businesses deploy around 36 apps on average. [Source: Okta, 2024]

Two studies, a few years apart, land in the same neighborhood: the typical small business runs dozens of separate tools. Every one of those tools has its own login, its own bill, and its own copy of your data. That is the practical difference between an all in one marketing platform and a stack you assembled one subscription at a time.

How much do small businesses spend on software?

The average company spends $2,884 per employee per year on SaaS subscriptions. [Source: Blissfully, 2019]

The average employee uses 8 different SaaS applications in the course of their work. [Source: Blissfully, 2019]

Per-employee software spend adds up faster than most owners expect, and it is not purely productive: unused seats, duplicate tools, and forgotten trials all sit inside that number. Consolidating overlapping subscriptions is the fastest, lowest-risk way to lower the line item without cutting the work it supports.

What does CRM adoption look like for small businesses?

71% of small businesses use a CRM system. [Source: Freshworks, 2024]

Adoption has moved well past the early-adopter phase: a clear majority of small businesses now run a CRM. The question is no longer whether to have one, but whether yours shares data with your email, invoicing, and automation, or sits as one more silo. A CRM for small business only pays off when the rest of the stack plugs into it, which is the case we make in our CRM software buyer's guide.

Why does tool fragmentation hurt small business marketing?

Knowledge workers switch between 10 apps 25 times per day. [Source: Asana, 2021]

71% of companies had at least one orphaned SaaS subscription with no billing owner. [Source: Blissfully, 2019]

Constant switching is a tax on focus, and orphaned subscriptions are the receipt for it. When your email platform cannot see your CRM and your invoicing tool cannot see either one, every campaign starts with manual exports and copy-paste. That is why small teams are increasingly looking at alternatives that replace several point tools at once instead of adding another one.

Sources

• Campaign Monitor, 2021.
• Mailchimp Email Marketing Benchmarks, 2023.
• Blissfully SaaS Trends Report, 2019.
• Fiverr Small Business Month Survey, 2025.
• Freshworks CRM Statistics, 2024.
• Okta SMBs at Work, 2024.
• Asana Anatomy of Work Index, 2021.

Bottom line: The numbers point one way. Small teams are short on marketing time, long on tools, and paying for software they do not fully use, while email and CRM remain the two channels worth getting right. AllMedia Marketer consolidates those channels and the tools around them into one platform, so the statistics above stop describing your week. See plans and upgrade here.