Canadians are Regaining Control of their Inboxes--Are You?

Email. It's hard to imagine life in business without it. What is amazing is that this business tool barely existed just over a decade ago. I distinctly remember the day (eleven years ago nearly to the day) that I started with Ipsos Reid because the company-wide email system was introduced that same day. Since then, email has become the essential business tool, the one and only true "killer app" of the web.

Canadians have only recently begun to regain control of their inboxes, despite the massive volume of emails we receive. About half of Canadians check their email daily, and the average Internet-enabled Canadian receives 164 emails per week! This number is driven by a relatively small percentage of Canadians (about one-fifth) who receive more than 200 emails per week, employed Canadians in the 35- to 54-year-old age category, particularly.

What might surprise you though is that the number of emails piling up in our inboxes is actually on the decline, primarily due to the drop in the number of unsolicited (spam) emails we receive relative to previous years. Since our first year of tracking this phenomenon in 2001, the number of unsolicited emails doubled each year, until 2003, when it peaked at 134 unsolicited emails per week. Since then, it has declined 35% to an average of 86 per week.

There are a number of factors contributing to this decline. The primary reason is the effectiveness of Internet service providers' anti-spam efforts, and 82% of Canadians use spam filtering software. Emails are rerouted from our inbox before we see them, right at the source. Second, the reduction in spam can also be attributed to the legislative crackdown on the worst offenders and privacy laws that have recently been enacted in both Canada and the U.S., which have made it more difficult for spammers to do their thing.

A more interesting story emerges behind the numbers, however, as Canadian attitudes towards email shows significant positives and negatives about this communications tool. On the positive side, a number of us say it is our preferred communications method, and many of us feel it has improved our efficiency at work. A very high number of Canadians (66%) actually prefer communicating via email to any other method, and that number has increased since we began tracking in 2002. Imagine that. We'd rather hit the keyboard than pick up the phone and talk to someone. On the flip side, about half of us wish people would simply pick up the phone more often, rather than have people send them another email. A similarly high number (54%) agree that email has made them more efficient at their work, a number that has stayed consistently high over the past four years. And in our most recent tracking wave, 19% of Internet users have access through a wireless device, like a Blackberry or cell phone, further increasing the ubiquitous reach of email.

On the downside, email has also resulted in us feeling guilty, overwhelmed, and frustrated with trying to keep up with the volume of email we receive on a daily basis. Four in ten Canadians feel that they can hardly keep up with the volume of email they receive; that feeling is highest among those between 35-54 years of age. Amusingly--but scary-- 30% of us dread going on vacation or taking days off because of the amount of email we will face upon our return.

There are a number of other pet peeves that Canadians have about improper email etiquette-- an area that hasn't really received much attention, despite our addiction to this communications method. In other research we conducted, we found that a significant number of us believe we are frequently inundated with email from our colleagues that are irrelevant to us. The other pet peeve is the misuse or abuse of blind copying. And most of us have frequently had miscommunication or have been uncomfortable with the tone of an email we have received.

The good news is that the results have improved slightly over the past five years we have been tracking these measures, but we still have a long way to go in regaining full control of our inboxes. At the end of the day, about half of us say we couldn't live without our email. The rest could simply do without. Try it for a day, a week, and let me know how it goes by emailing me--er, or simply pick up the phone and call me.

In the next two articles, I will be addressing spam in more detail and talk about legitimate email marketing. Stay tuned.

This article has been reprinted with the permission of Business in Vancouver. For more details, go to www.biv.com.