Which local trades publish an email, and which never do

Both are high-street businesses in the same small corner of Europe.

One of them publishes an email 17 times as often as the other.

That spread is the story. A blanket claim about email coverage in the Nordics means nothing.

Across everything we hold, 6,180 of 23,846 listings carry an email. That is 26%.

The best row in the study is Norwegian car rental agencies, at 75% of 244.

The worst rows sit at zero, and we think that says more about us than about them. More on that below.

• Norway — 3,686 of 9,632 publish an email, which is 38%
• Sweden — 1,219 of 6,404 publish an email, which is 19%
• Denmark — 670 of 3,927 publish an email, which is 17%
• Finland — 605 of 3,883 publish an email, which is 16%

Norway leads at 38% and Finland trails at 16%. Denmark and Sweden sit close together.

Some of that is real. Some of it is how deep we have run the email pass in each country.

We say that up front because the honest version is more useful than the flattering one.

• Norwegian car rental agencies — 75% of 244 give you an email
• Norwegian opticians — 68% of 271 give you an email
• Swedish opticians — 57% of 300 give you an email
• Norwegian florists — 54% of 224 give you an email
• Norwegian pharmacies — 54% of 259 give you an email
• Danish opticians — 54% of 229 give you an email
• Norwegian driving schools — 53% of 337 give you an email
• Norwegian chiropractors — 52% of 460 give you an email
• Norwegian veterinary clinics — 52% of 199 give you an email
• Norwegian electricians — 48% of 602 give you an email

Opticians, pharmacies, driving schools and car hire all sit high.

Every one of them takes bookings from strangers. An email address is part of the shop.

And the ones you have to phone

• Finnish opticians — 0% of 226 give you an email
• Swedish travel agencies — 1% of 206 give you an email
• Danish travel agencies — 2% of 172 give you an email
• Swedish painters — 2% of 228 give you an email
• Swedish carpenters — 2% of 162 give you an email
• Danish painters — 3% of 304 give you an email
• Swedish photographers — 3% of 268 give you an email
• Finnish photographers — 7% of 199 give you an email

Travel agents, painters, carpenters and photographers fill that list.

Painters and carpenters win work by word of mouth. Nobody in the trade ever needed a contact page.

Travel agents are a different case. Most of them have a site, and they take contact through a form.

One line there is our fault, not theirs. Finnish opticians read 0% while Swedish ones read 57%.

The same trade cannot behave that differently next door. That row is a hole in our crawl.

A list with no email is still a good list. It is a phone list, and it costs more time.

• Car rental agencies — 75% of 244 publish an email, 11% have no site
• Pharmacies — 54% of 259 publish an email, 7% have no site
• Opticians — 47% of 1,026 publish an email, 7% have no site
• Gyms — 42% of 941 publish an email, 13% have no site
• Veterinary clinics — 38% of 605 publish an email, 11% have no site
• Plumbers — 37% of 778 publish an email, 28% have no site
• Chiropractors — 36% of 727 publish an email, 16% have no site
• Bakeries — 35% of 732 publish an email, 17% have no site
• Florists — 32% of 615 publish an email, 24% have no site
• Law firms — 31% of 871 publish an email, 31% have no site
• Electricians — 31% of 1,517 publish an email, 25% have no site
• Roofing contractors — 30% of 897 publish an email, 15% have no site
• Restaurants — 30% of 646 publish an email, 13% have no site
• Estate agencies — 27% of 1,057 publish an email, 33% have no site
• Dentists — 26% of 1,549 publish an email, 38% have no site
• Driving schools — 22% of 824 publish an email, 14% have no site
• Bookkeepers — 20% of 470 publish an email, 21% have no site
• Accountants — 19% of 1,429 publish an email, 46% have no site
• Cleaning companies — 19% of 522 publish an email, 25% have no site
• Beauty salons — 19% of 1,290 publish an email, 20% have no site
• Carpenters — 18% of 1,106 publish an email, 36% have no site
• Physiotherapists — 16% of 902 publish an email, 32% have no site
• Travel agencies — 15% of 652 publish an email, 32% have no site
• Hairdressers — 15% of 529 publish an email, 25% have no site
• Hair salons — 14% of 1,715 publish an email, 31% have no site
• Photographers — 10% of 1,164 publish an email, 24% have no site
• Painters — 9% of 779 publish an email, 36% have no site

Read the two numbers on each line together. They move against each other, and that is the mechanism.

That sounds obvious. It is worth checking, so we checked it.

Split every Norwegian trade by its website gap and the email share falls off a cliff.

• Trades where under 15% lack a site — 61% publish an email, across 1,310 listings
• Trades where 30% or more lack a site — 30% publish an email, across 4,855 listings

That is a drop of 31 points, inside one country, on the same crawl.

The correlation across all 25 Norwegian trades is -0.77. For a field measure that is strong.

The same split across all four countries is softer. 36% against 22%, and a correlation of -0.30.

It softens because our email pass runs deeper in some countries than others.

Within one country the effect is clean. Across countries our own coverage gets in the way.

This also explains a thing that looks odd. Norway has the widest website gap and the highest email share.

Both are true because our Norwegian crawl is the deepest one we run. Coverage beats country.

Where the data comes from

Public Google Maps business listings in Norway, Sweden, Denmark and Finland.

Where a listing links to a website, we read the site for a public contact address.

Only open listings count. Permanently closed ones drop out on the next pass.

What "publishes an email" means

We hold a business email address for that listing, found on a public page.

It is a business address, not a personal one. We do not guess patterns from a name.

We do not build addresses. A guessed address bounces, and a bounce costs you your domain.

When we collected it

The pass that finished on 26 July 2026. Every figure moves as we re-crawl.

Quote the date beside the number and your citation stays true.

The sample

23,846 listings, 27 trades, four countries, 81 trade-country pairs.

The smallest pair holds 152 listings. We publish nothing thinner than that.

Four rows read zero, and we do not believe them

4 of our 81 trade-country pairs show no email at all.

• Swedish cleaning companies — 272 listings, zero emails found
• Swedish driving schools — 252 listings, zero emails found
• Danish photographers — 262 listings, zero emails found
• Danish driving schools — 235 listings, zero emails found

A true zero across hundreds of firms is not credible. Some of those firms publish an address.

The likely cause is our own pass. The email crawl for those trades has not finished.

We leave the zeros in the table and flag them here. Hiding them would be the worse choice.

Treat any row under 5% as a floor, not a fact.

The rest of the limits

• Coverage depth differs by country, so cross-country comparisons are softer than trade ones.
• Our index is not a census. It covers the trades we crawl in each country.
• A listing is not a company. A three-branch firm appears three times.
• A shared inbox counts as one email, however many people read it.
• An address that exists today may bounce next month. We hold a last-seen date for that reason.
• A firm can take contact through a web form and never show an address. We count that as no email.

That last one matters more than it looks. A form is contact without a contactable address.

It also hides the real inbox behind a routing rule you cannot reach from outside.

Take the numbers. They are free to quote, chart or reprint.

We ask one thing back. Link to this page as the source.

Want the raw table as a file? Ask us and we will send it.

Our contact details sit on the about page.