Zipwhip, the inventor of Texting for Business™, released survey findings showing that consumers open just a fraction of the emails they receive. Thirty-nine percent of consumers have more than 100 unread emails in their personal inbox, with 20% of people saying they have over 1,000. It’s no surprise that unread messages pile up given that more than half (56%) of consumers estimate they receive between 25 and 100 emails a day in their personal inboxes, and most (74%) read fewer than just 10 emails per day.
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“You have to ask yourself if you’re using the communication medium that your customers prefer or the one that you were told 20 years ago works the best”
The data confirms some of marketers’ worst fears about their one-sided attachment to email – that their main route for communicating with customers is missing the mark. While consumers describe their email inboxes as “cluttered” and “overwhelming,” many businesses still use email as their primary method of outreach.
In order to further evade marketers and unwanted emails, most consumers (77%) have two or more personal email accounts, and 62% have an email address they use solely for accounts with businesses or to sign up for promotions. An email address is one of the first pieces of information a business captures, but this finding shows that it may be less useful than what was previously thought.
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While consumers have multiple email addresses and silo their communication according to priority, most only have one cell phone number and respond promptly to texts. Eighty-three percent reply to text messages from a business within 30 minutes or less, and texts generally have a 98% open rate. That’s part of why most consumers (51%) say they trust text messages most when it comes to receiving important messages at any time of day, compared to 35% who prefer email and 14% who prefer phone calls.
“You have to ask yourself if you’re using the communication medium that your customers prefer or the one that you were told 20 years ago works the best,” said John Lauer, CEO at Zipwhip. “Businesses need to get creative about their communication strategies and pay attention to what both research and lived experiences are showing us – that there is a time for email but it’s not the catch-all communication medium it used to be. If you want to reach your customers, you need to broaden your horizons.”
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