Despite the overload, emails are here to stay

Are emails still worth it? Do they live up their hype? Now that we reached 2018, some could think email has done its time: riddled by spams and unsavory practices, the medium might have lost any remaining utility.

Appearances are misleading and email is yet another support to demonstrates the accuracy of the adage. We’ll dive deeper into the data below, but before let’s approach the issue from a higher-level perspective.

AN OLD YET STILL UBIQUITOUS KING

Despite his old age, email is still very much alive. Doubtful? Please answer these two questions for me:

1. How many different emails accounts do you currently monitor on a daily to weekly basis?
2. How many emails total do you get on all the addresses daily?

I’m not a big user nor fan of emails, yet I frequently check 6 different email accounts (three personal accounts, one for spammy services such as e-e-commerce websites, one for serious services, one for humans; and three professional accounts) easily totalizing over 30 incoming messages daily despite a very selective methodology enforced to clean them.

From what I’ve heard discussing with friends and colleagues, I would say I’m in the low-range of the spectrum: I have plenty of colleagues that would make the numbers I gave you above look tiny. What about you?

Now that our introspective moment has passed let’s take this a step higher and have a cold look at the data.

DATA, DATA, DATA

First, let’s have a look at the high-level usage metrics to get an idea of the size of the beast:

• 4.3 billion users (users, not account) — email is on a tie with SMS for the title of “most widespread mean of communication of all time.”
• More than 250 billion emails sent every day: that’s 36 emails for every human on Earth sent daily or 150 000 each minute.

All right, that’s plenty! However, people don’t read their emails anymore, right? They receive too many to process them! Although an office worker receives on average 121 emails per day, we observe:

• [USA] Average opening rate: 34.1%
• [USA] Average click-through rate: 3.1% (=people clicking at least one link present in the email body)

The crazy part about all of this is realizing that people do read and respond to their email indeed everywhere:

• More than 55% of the opened emails are read on a mobile device.
• [USA] 50 % of Americans check their email while in bed
• [USA] 42% while in the bathroom
• [USA] and even a staggering 18% while driving

Click here to check the source of the data presented before, or if you would like to dive deeper.

So far, we’ve looked at our usage of emails as well as the protocol-level usage of it. Now you might ask yourself: where is this long-lasting dominance coming from?

Before we explore some potential explanations for the email homerun, let’s remind ourselves something fundamental yet quite often overlooked: email is still prevalent today because nobody came up with something better yet. Strangely enough, the famous quote from Churchill about democracy works quite well with email too:

Email [democracy] is the worst form of communication [government], except for all the others.

THE SOURCES OF THE LONG-LASTING DOMINATION OF EMAILS

So, how to explain the spread between email dominance and the image of a dying medium? How can the reality be so far apart from what we expect?

I see two main factors contributing to the spread:

1. The Novelty Bias: The tendency for an intervention to appear better when it is new.. We, weak humans, are prone to biases and the worst part about them is that they are insidious – we don’t realize we are affected by them. The novelty bias could explain why we’re so prone to believe a fancy new tech (Slack?) will quickly replace an old yet battle-tested one, despite what the data suggests (email isn’t going anywhere).
2. New technologies can enhance the old ones: the email landscape of 1971 (the year of the first email) was nothing like the current one. The B2B Marketing Automation Market (which is more than just email, but still) is currently valued over $3.5 billion with a yearly growth rate close to 30%.

THE EVER EVOLVING EMAIL ECOSYSTEM

Thousands of tools (software and services) have been developed over the email protocol, providing all kinds of services including:

• Email providers and clients
• Services to find emails and refind databases
• Email automation tools
• Spam detection and prevention tools
• Newsletter/Campaign manager
• CRM using emails
• Lessons/Training sessions teaching you how to write sale-driving emails.
• And many others.

We now have a full ecosystem surrounding emails, providing more features while also making them easier to access (think mobile email clients for instance).

Finding data covering only email-related services is hard. The marketing automation industry is much bigger than just emails, but it can give us an overall sense of the dynamic of the email industry:

Marketing Automation Market Growth (