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You are here: Home / Platforms / What is Email Spam Made of and What Does it Cost Us?

What is Email Spam Made of and What Does it Cost Us?

by Matt Fields

It is probably safe to say that almost everyone hates email spam. To get a better idea of the impact of email spam as well as email marketing, let’s look at the data presented in this email vs spam infographic below.

Spam by Category

The amount of spam that exists varies by category. Products makes up 25%, financial services 2% and porn 19% of email spam offers.

Cost of Spam

The overall cost of spam to both corporations and individuals is pretty staggering. According to the sources in this infographic, businesses in the U.S. lose $8.6 million a year from spam. That works out to be $712 in lost productivity on average per employee. The cost of spam to all internet users is also staggering — around $255 million per year.

Spam Decreasing

Out of all the emails sent per day, 12.4 billion of them are spam. This works out to be 6 spam emails per person. Despite the massive amount of email spam, this infographic claims 53% of people reported a decrease in spam over the last year. Despite this decrease, 9%  of emails reaching corporate servers is spam and 94% of all email is actually spam.

Open Rates

Now for the good news: despite the massive amounts of spam on the web, some industries have very high email open rates. The highest of which are agriculture at 25.3%, religion at 21%, transportation at 18.1 and large corporations at 17.3%. Out of all categories of email, the lowest open rates are among entertainment at 9.2%, banking at 8.2%, marketing at 7.2%, and medical at 7.3%.

Click Through Rates

It is interesting to note that there is not much of a correlation between open rates and click through rates. If you look at the highest average click through rates for email maretking the arts are number one at 8.75%, education is at 6.66%, and travel is at 6.43%.

Most Successful Spam

Now that we have covered the types of email marketing that has the highest open and click through rates, let’s look at what type of spam has the highest click through rates according to the data in the infographic. Big surprise! Porn is the most successful type of spam with 5.6% of recipients clicking through.

Infographic courtesy of Love Infographics.

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