How many emails does Mr X get a day?
And this leads to the thought that maybe they actually wouldn’t mind being contacted more by companies in whom they’ve expressed an interest.
This view comes from the fact that most writing about email and email deliverability comes from people in the IT industry who tend to get huge amounts of email, because that’s the business they are in. Likewise journalists who write about such things tend to subscribe to all sorts of newsletters etc looking for stories.
So they make the assumption that people generally get the same as them.
To test out this theory I just asked people in my office – and it turns out I get 10 times as much email as anyone else – but then I am in the job of communicating via email.
Research in the US is suggesting that a lot of people wish their favourite stores and usual firms they deal with would send them more.
I can empathise with this. I shop at Gap quite often, and being a cheapskate often look for their sales lines. If they would just email to say there’s a sale on at xxx store, I’d like that.
In 2010, Hotmail said it was delivering 2.5 billion emails to inboxes each day, which works out to 7.14 emails per account per day. Assuming half of those are deals and newsletters, “an average Hotmail inbox would get between 3 and 4 marketing emails a day.”
Yahoo’s latest gizmo shows how many emails it’s currently delivering each second and this comes up with 8.6 emails per user per day.
But that is an average – half the population is below average – and these might be the people we are after.
We are going to do some surveying of our own in the near future to see how this stacks up – but if true it would add to the growing theory that low response rates in email campaigns are due to poor writing rather than overloaded in boxes.
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Tony
01536 399 000.
