How To Combat "Inbox Triage"

What do you think your subscribers are doing with your e-mail right this minute?

Most likely, they aren't sitting at a desk scrolling patiently through their inboxes, looking for your message.

Instead, they're doing what David Daniels, Jupiter Research VP, calls "inbox triage" -- wading through their increasingly cluttered inboxes quickly to remove the junk (permission e-mail as well as spam) before they start reading and responding.

They're multitasking like crazy, too: watching TV, talking on the phone, instant-messaging, listening to their iPods, downloading, taking a break from an online game, or even all of these at once.

They're also getting sidetracked by their e-mail clients, which keep squeezing the inbox into a smaller space to make room for RSS feeds, social-networking tabs, instant messaging clients, calendars, contact lists, notepads, and display ads.

Here's a snapshot of your subscribers' inbox behavior, according to Daniels' research:

• The average person gets 274 personal e-mail messages a week and 304 work e-mails.
• 74 percent have at least two e-mail accounts (either personal and work, or shared and personal, or public and private accounts)
• The average reader takes two to five seconds to decide whether to read or delete an e-mail.

Studies of how people manage their cluttered inboxes vary, but the results are the same: They hit the "report as spam" button when they don't recognize the sender, often without opening the e-mail.

Continue reading here to find out what you should do to get your messages recognized and read.