Do you wonder what email did to the universe to have so many predicting its death? Year after year after year.
Perhaps it’s all the bad emails that have so many attempting to hasten its demise.
Yet, email is alive and thriving – especially in the business arena.
Email Me That Report
The technology market research company, the Radicati Group, Inc., loves to study email data. They started with 2010 data in their 2014 report.
Their most recent report studied data from 2017 and made four-year forecasts for both business and consumer email accounts. The following are some interesting results.
- 269 billion – the total number of business and consumer emails sent and received PER DAY
- 319.6 billion – the projected total for the end of 2021
- 3.7 billion – the number of worldwide email users in 2017 (approximately 1/2 of the worldwide population)
Another report conducted by Adobe reported in its US Report that 61% of customers preferred being contacted by brands through email. (Wouldn’t you rather offer one of your several email addresses than your phone number?)
The interesting thing about reports and statistics is all the different angles you can take on them. Since I put a twist on one of Mark Twain’s quotes in the post title, allow me to offer another.
“There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies and statistics.”
Mark Twain’s Own Autobiography: The Chapters from the North American Review
Hold Off on the Eulogy
So, let’s throw in a few more lies – I mean – statistics – to keep the debate going. The graphic below shares stats from various sources.
Maybe what we need to do is take email off automatic pilot and help it soar with the human touch. How important is email to your business communication? Share your thoughts in Comments.
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This is an update of a post that originally published on May 21, 2010. The demise of the cartoon platform, Bitstrips, prompted me to revisit older posts where I created the above Baby Boomer character. This is the second revised post in the series.
I’ll take a slight detour on the next post to update a post on improving your business email.
Infographic design using Canva
Nah… I don’t believe it. TV didn’t kill movies. Email has hurt but not killed the post office. IM has changed the way I communicate with my grandkids. But email is still far to convenient to declare dead any time soon… of course, I am in the, ahem, older crowd. 😉
.-= Anne Wayman´s last blog ..Freelance Writing Jobs For Friday, May 21, 2010 =-.
And I’m right there in that older crowd, too, Anne! It’s kind of funny when you think all the social media requires your email address for confirmation and creating an account…hmm…
I agree with Anne. Email will never die. It is the best way to keep track of and archive conversations. And it helps people hone their writing and communication skills.
As an aside, I am currently creating an email training for corporations for this reason. I feel this post confirms I’m on the right track. Thanks, Cathy!
Hi, Marcie. Thanks for weighing in. Corporate training for email is much needed in my humble opinion. Best of luck in your venture.
Cathy, these days it seems to me that most of the predictions are saying stuff like people would rather text than email. I sure don’t. Of course, I’m of a certain age. That’s why I totally agree with you, the demise of email is, once again, vastly overstated.
Yep, they have been trying to kill off email for quite some time. But, isn’t it funny how those same people who want to see email die typically have more than one email address? 😉