Worldwide Use of Email

The current 3.1 billion email accounts that exist this year are expected to grow to reach an impressive 4.1 billion by 2014. Approximately 75 percent of all email accounts are owned by consumers, with the remainder owned by corporations. Asia and its surrounding municipalities comprise nearly half of all email users and nearly 15 percent of email users worldwide live in the United States. Europe sits in the middle with approximately 22 percent of all email users worldwide.

Communication via the Internet has quickly advanced into the primary means of sending messages. Internet usage statistics collected by the Radicati Group found that the average corporate employee sends approximately 110 messages through the Internet on any given day. The total number of email accounts worldwide which already number more than 300 million will climb appreciably to more than 1 billion by the year 2014.

It's interesting to note that despite the enormous volume of emails sent worldwide daily, the vast majority are categorized as spam or unsolicited marketing. According to Royal Pingdom, nearly 90 percent of all email worldwide is spam. Given the approximately 300 billion email messages sent worldwide daily, more than 250 billion of them are spam. This accounts for the 91 percent unsubscribe rate.

In contrast to the 50 percent of American Internet users who used email daily in 2002, PewInternet reports that the figure has escalated to more than 90 percent in 2011. The average daily American email user, according to their findings, is a male who is between the ages of 18 and 29, is a college graduate and has an annual salary of more than $75,000.00.

Mobile content, including email, is rapidly overtaking traditionally accessed communication through the Internet. The OnlineMarketingTrends reports that more than 75 percent of all individuals in business use their mobile device to check their email. Comscore statistics found that in contrast to the perception that the United States leads the world in the use of mobile content, European users surpassed their American counterparts in smartphone subscribers in 2010. The fastest growing mobile category in the United States is personal email but for Europeans, it's social networking. This discrepancy may be attributed to the significantly less generous data plans available to European users, compared to unlimited data plan availability to American users.

While corporate email is popular, most Internet users rely on a free email account. In 2008, free email accounts totaled over 600 million users worldwide. This figure has risen to over 2 billion in 2010. Today, most email accounts are of the free, mobile variety, with corporate email accounts lagging and capturing only about 25 percent of the email market.

References:
http://www.radicati.com/wp/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/Email-Statistics-Report-2011-2015-Executive-Summary.pdf
http://royal.pingdom.com/2011/01/12/internet-2010-in-numbers/
http://infodocket.com/2011/08/09/new-internet-usage-statistics-u-s-search-and-email-remain-most-popular-online-activities/
http://pewinternet.org/Reports/2011/Search-and-email/Report.aspx
http://www.onlinemarketing-trends.com/2011/03/statistics-on-mobile-email-consumption.html
http://www.comscore.com/Press_Events/Presentations_Whitepapers/2011/2010_Mobile_Year_in_Review