Are companies taking advantage of the growth of email?

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Despite all the doom and gloom predictions about email, figures provided by Radicati Group show a growing volume, both in the number of accounts opened and in the volume of activity. In 2012 there were 3.3 billion accounts, and by 2016 the figure is expected to reach 4.3 billion worldwide, with an annual growth of 6% over the next four years.

Nearly half of current users are located in the Asia-Pacific region. Europe accounts for 22% of all users, North America for 14%, and the remaining 14% come from all other regions.

Within this huge volume, corporate accounts represented 25% of the total in 2012, a figure that will grow to 27% in 2016. As for the traffic generated, the majority comes from the business sector. In 2012, the number of business emails sent or received daily reached 89 billion, a figure that will grow by 13% annually over the next 4 years, reaching 143 billion messages per day in 2016.

And not only is traffic and the number of accounts active mobile number list growing, but there is also a shift in how people access email. More and more consumers are accessing their email accounts using mobile devices, growing at twice the rate of access via desktop devices. Since August 2012, email access via tablets and smartphones has grown by 114% and 83% respectively, compared to 40% growth on PCs, according to data from SendGrid.

According to Radicati data, the number of mobile email users has reached 730 million people worldwide, which already represents 34% of the total number of users worldwide.

But despite the fact that more and more users are using mobile access, eConsultancy found last year that 39% of businesses still don't have a clear strategy for mobile email. They are still sending emails to mobile devices that are optimised for PCs rather than smartphones, leading to users having an unsuitable experience that is likely to result in the email ending up in the trash before it is read or being treated as spam.