Anders Frankel

Survey of e-mail clients

Mobile solutions still account for less than 1 %.

Hotmail and Outlook remain at the top.

Hotmail, Gmail and Outlook are still the most widely used solutions to read e-mail. The proportion of Swedes that use mobile phones as their main email client is still below 1 %.

This survey was carried out between 16/2 – 19/2 2010 and was answered by 1075 individuals of different genders and ages living all over Sweden. The purpose of the survey is to give marketers information they need to customize their e-mail marketing for the market's most widely used email clients.

Observations
The three most widely used e-mail clients have a market share of 75 %, according to the answers to the question “What solution do you usually use to read your private e-mail”. The complete chart is show below.



The e-mail clients that require the most work to show graphic e-mail messages correctly have a total market share of less than 2 %. As a consequence, e-mail marketers who want to reach consumers should focus on a design that looks good in clients such as Hotmail and various versions of Outlook (including Outlook 2007) – then the design will look good in the other clients that are widely used. The e-mail message should have a design that looks good even without images, since both Gmail and Hotmail does not automatically load the images for all senders.

Optimizing e-mail messages for mobile readers does not seem to be that important in the short term, given that the mobile phone with the greatest market share – iPhone – only has about 0,7 % share and generally displays graphical e-mail messages well.

Differences based on age and gender
Hotmail is dominant in most age groups, but has a declining market share when we reach older users. 80 % of the respondents between 15-22 years use Hotmail as their main e-mail client, while the proportion of respondents aged 56 and over is only 16.9 %. In this group, Outlook is more popular with a market share of 36.7 %.

Hotmail is clearly a more popular client among women (46.5 %) than men (32.2 %). Men tend to use Gmail (13 % for men, 9,2 % for women), Outlook (26,9 % for men, 21,5 % for women) and iPhone (0,9 % for men, 0,4 % for women).

The question: “What solution do you normally use to read e-mail at work?”
When people use e-mail professionally, things are quite different. Lotus Notes is used by nearly 10 % at work, compared with less than 1 % when it comes to private e-mail. Hotmail is hardly used at work, and Gmail is used by roughly the same number of recipients at work and at home. (Since the survey included respondents of all ages, a large proportion did not work.) Adjusted for those who does not work or use e-mail professionally, Microsoft Outlook becomes the most popular e-mail client with a market share of more than 40 %.

E-mail on mobile devices is not yet significant – not even in a professional settting – with a market share of less then 1 %.
E-mail marketers targeting B2B clients should adjust and test their designs for the same clients as if they were targeting B2C customers, with the addition to also test and adjust the content for Lotus Notes.

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