What?S In Your Inbox These Days?

Promos, Promos, And More Promos

What in the world is in your inbox!? That’s a question that I recently posed to the entire DirectIQ team. Many of us shared the same response: Promos, promos, and more promos — and according to a recent Return Path study, we’re not the only ones.

Modern Inbox Is Primarily About Business Communications

From October 1st, 2014 to December 31st 2014, Return Path carried out a study that analyzed mailbox interactions of about 2 million subscribers that in total received about 3.8 billion emails. The results of their study demonstrated that the modern inbox isn’t primarily about personal communications with friends and family, but rather business. Promotional emails accounted for most of the messages analyzed by Return Path, making up 53.5% of all emails. If you want to know what kind of promotional emails Americans prefer? Read our post about it here. After promos. 28.3% of the emails were transactional, such as confirmations, receipts, notifications etc. Only 18.2% of the emails were found to be personal.

Forwards, Direct Messages, Replies And Notifications

When they took a closer look at personal messages, Return Path found that .1% of them were messages that had been forwarded. As for the rest, 48.9% were direct messages, and 51% of the personal messages were replies. Most of the transactional messages were made up of alert notifications at 34.6%, and receipts at 30.4%.

Email Frequency

Return Path also assessed a topic that we obsess over over here at DirectIQ, email frequency. In fact, check out our article on the problems with mobile email, which discusses email frequency at length. That said, Return Path found that most of us (46%), receive 5 promotional emails a day, and 25%  about 6-10 per day. Check out the image below for more details 🙂