Email is here to stay

And with 90 million of them sent last year, probably here to stay for a good while. The total number of users according to Royal Pingdom was 1.4 billion in 2009, and if that doesn’t sound like much, a technology market research firm, The Radicati Group estimates this number will rise to 1.9 billion by 2013.

Email monetisation means that these statistics should make the email service providers and marketers delighted. But wait, there is more.

90% of us (those who are connected) have an email account (what about the other 10%?!), and we tend to favour the ‘big guys’ such as Windows Live Hotmail, Yahoo, and Gmail, popularity of which varies across countries and continents. While the latter two give Hotmail a run for its money, it’s still number one in many markets around the world.

According to a blog post (A peek behind the scenes at Hotmail), by Arthur de Haan Test and System Engineer at Windows Live, Hotmail is a worldwide service, delivering localized versions to 59 regional markets, in 36 languages. Over 350 million people are actively using Hotmail on a monthly basis (source: comScore, August 2009), as they collectively check 1.3 billion inboxes. Every day, Hotmail handles 3 billion messages and filter out 1 billion spam.

Amazing. But wait, there is more still.

Taking all emails into consideration:
- 247 billion emails were sent on average in 2009 every day.
- Out of those a whopping 200 billion were junk, which leaves 47 billion emails daily for the 1.4 billion users worldwide.
- 33.6 emails per day on average is certainly less than half of what I get…

One of the factors that is driving these numbers up is that people who also use social networking keep checking their inboxes at a much higher frequency than those who don’t - probably in part checking notifications that are sent to these email addresses (chart below). However, it’s good news all around, as according to a survey (2nd chart below) 63% of users admitted to using the same email account for permission marketing as email notifications. And that is the inbox that marketers are keen to reach.

 



So where does this all leave us?

Conclusion:
- email is here to stay
- both email usage and number of new accounts are predicted to grow
- those who use social networking tend to check their inboxes almost twice as much as those who don’t and a large majority use this same account for permission marketing

All the above suggests, that email marketing, a highly customisable, powerful and cost effective direct communication tool can still reach large audiences.
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