The Inbox is a Battlefield [infographic]

I would love to get my hands in Return Path’s data – I could hide away in there running data and looking at stats for days (if not weeks) on end!

Luckily for everyone, they’re pretty good at pulling out the salient bits from it all – and this infographic is no exception.

Unlike most infographics about email marketing this one looks at it from the users viewpoint – making it very clear that we’re not doing battle with our competition – we’re doing battle with every email that’s sent.

On average people receive 416 commercial emails a month – that’s 14 per day (if you assume as many are sent on the weekends as weekdays). Of those, almost a quarter are daily deals! With social networking and dating coming next.

What I found to be the most interesting stats on this infographic though, are those about engagement with different types of message. Health and Beauty and banking rank VERY highly. (not that humans are vain or money-hungry!)

What does this tell us marketers? – You can never rest, your subject lines and content have GOT to work hard every single time. Getting into the inbox is only step one.

See it all here: