What? We’re only getting 10 e-mails a day?
The spam and promotional e-mails arriving in your inbox daily is out of control. Or is it?
According to a new report by , the company sums up the last quarter of 2014: “.”
The report analyzed e-mail between October to December last year and found the average inbox received just 10 e-mails a day. Nearly half of everybody received fewer than six a day. About 14 percent received more than 20.
Now, ReturnPath knows a lot about e-mail. It is the behind-the-scenes company that analyzes e-mail sent to consumers by 180,000-plus companies. Customers include SendGrid, the Boulder firm that sends out 14 billion e-mails a month for customers like Pinterest, Uber and Spotify. This particular report studied 3.8 billion messages delivered to 2 million subscribers during the quarter.
I don’t know about your inbox, but I’m obviously not average. By 11:33 a.m. Thursday, I counted 59 e-mails since midnight in my inbox dedicated to promotional e-mails (all those retailers who insist on having an e-mail address). Another eight ended up in the spam folder. I’m scared to count up the messages in my regular e-mail, let alone my work address (the latter, I want to add, began getting spam within 24 hours of being created — how is that possible?)
The average inbox received 10 messages a day between October to December 2014. Here’s the breakdown of the variety of users. Source: ReturnPath
ReturnPath says it’s possible. People like me are on the fringe.
“I thought that number was really low too and even questioned our analyst on this,” said Tom Sather, ReturnPath’s senior director of research who is based in Denver. “I had her rerun the numbers.”
They came out the same. Backing up the 10 e-mails per day was a report from Google that it decided to redesign Gmail because “a typical Gmail user was receiving .”
Part of it may be that e-mail marketers tread lightly these days on how often to send customers an e-mail.
“Take surveys with a grain of salt,” Sather said. “I see surveys that ask, ‘Do you receive too much e-mail?’ and 90 percent say ‘yes!’ But if you look at their behavior, I think people are over-exaggerating.”
ReturnPath’s report found that 22.4 percent of e-mail is read — or nearly 1 in 4. That’s considered effective marketing.
“This goes to show that I don’t think (marketers) have gone far enough,” he added.
Of course, ReturnPath also makes money by selling its data and services that show how effective e-mail is — or isn’t — to marketers. The pitch: When done right, e-mail marketing is tolerated and read by consumers, and they “actually like it,” concluded the report.
Earlier:
