A recent study by Osterman Research concluded that “a typical email user will spend about 1.7 weeks just managing their mailbox, or about 3% of their time at work.” Based on an annual salary of $60,000, that’s a productivity cost of $2,000 a year. Thanks to Sue Duris of M4 Communications for this tidbit.
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What readers say
The problem is that we also deal with email at home, so you could conservatively say that we spend 3 weeks a year dealing with email.
This trnaslates into 17.3% of our salary. Which for just one person like me comes to $15,000+, and I am not at the top of the food chain. Compare that cost to the amount of money that real spammer you met made $1,000+. Then, take that spammer’s income as a portion of the 200,000 pieces of spam it took him to make that money and multiply it by the receipients time, $3M.
Three million dollars were consumed by one spammer to get $1K. This is why spam is stupid.
Direct mail doesn’t cost me anything, because I’m already walking into the house. I would be priotizing my mail anway. But, I can’t see my email until I get rid of the spam.
Another reason spam is stupid is that it errodes legitimate permissions mail campaign effectiveness. I use spam filters. I constantly have to go and undo decisions the spam filters make, because it is filtering my permission mail. It’s not the software’s fault. It’s other people who don’t pull their permissions and just start calling it spam. So permission mail gets pulled into the spam classification.
Permission marketers need to guard against their becoming spam. And, permission marketing consumers should realize that they should unsub rather than spam filter it.
My spam filter saves me time, while eating a little less of my time than the spam. My biggest fear is spam filtering something personal or business that is not spam. That is even a bigger problem than time consumption.
Spam and spam filtering is making email unreliable. It used to be that a particular brand of pager had plausible deniability built in. You didn’t always get that page. Now, email has evolved into the same situation.
Have no friends not equal to yourself.
John Bradford, Encyclopedia of Word and Phrase Origins
some good stuff here