Employees don’t open 40% of emails: report

An average employee gets about 180 emails every day and 40% of them are not opened, a new report found. In its first annual ‘State of Email’ report, Hiver, a provider of software that facilitates email collaboration, said that for emails that are opened, the reply rate is just 16%.

The report, prepared by gathering data from 1,000 email accounts of employees from various companies, said the biggest contributor to email overload is group emails sent to shared inboxes or distribution lists: 51% of emails people receive are group emails.

The other culprits cluttering mailboxes are forwards and cc, which account for 13% and 8% respectively of emails that people get.

“The low response and read rates for cc and forwarded emails demonstrate that while people want to use email as a collaboration tool, it was clearly not designed for it,” says Niraj Rout, co-founder and CEO of Hiver.

Additionally, employees open 84% of the emails they are cc’ed on, but reply to only 19%. And, out of the emails forwarded to people they open 70% of them but reply to only 20%

Out of the group emails, a little over half are opened, but employees only reply to 14%, says the report.