The Email Wars

Do you ever stop and pause to think about how much time YOU spend on managing your email inbox? I know that I deal with between 300 and 600 emails a day. Yikes that is a scary number. Sure many of these are junk and ones that do not require any action on my part, but let’s turn the lens on our subscribers. Just how much time does the average consumer spend on managing, processing and reading email? 

As I do not have any hard figures around this number as it exists today I took a look at a program I use that measures what applications I use on my laptop on a daily and weekly basis. Scarily enough over 40% of my time each week is spent in and around the inbox. Wow I need an intervention. 

So what about the subscribers that we are all trying to target better, be more relevant to, and grab the brand mindshare of our products and services? Do they have time? And if they do are your messages standing out during the barrage of daily email triage that they are waging as well? I think taking this into consideration might help you to think more about how, when and what you are sending. Think in terms of your subscribers and not your programs. 

Now I am sure that most of them are not like us. But many of them have their own lives, jobs and issues to deal with. So one campaign is not going to make you hit your goals. But dropping campaigns over time (I like the number 3 for a messaging metric myself) with a few touches that are relevant based on behavior might make the difference in this busy environment.