I once read a 2005 study that stated that the average consumer was sending and receiving approximately 133 emails per day (that includes legitimate and junk mail on all personal and work accounts). The study estimated that our average daily volumes would increase by approximately 20% in the coming years.

At the recent Email Insider Summit, Jupiter-Kagan Research Email Marketing Analyst David Daniels asked a panel of email service providers if they had a great Q1 of 2007. We all did (WhatCounts just wrapped up another monthly company sales record yesterday, and Q2 of 2007 will be another record quarter). He then asked a panel of leading email marketers if they are spending more on email this year than they did last year. That answer was a unanimous yes as well. Simply put, marketers are sending more email this year than they did last year. Since we are only talking about permission-based messages to subscribers who want to receive them, this trend is a win-win for everybody. The recipient gets more of the messages they want, and the marketer and service provider leverage this extremely cost effective medium more as time goes on.

But, coming from a web analytics background, the anecdotal evidence of a bunch of people raising their hands at a conference wasn’t enough for me. So, I did a simple study of a random selection of 300 leading email marketing organizations who work with WhatCounts. Nowhere near the whole customer list, but just a random cross-section to try to come up with a statistically relevant conclusion. The list included companies for which I have at least 18 months of volume history, and I merely calculated their volume increase over their monthly average. There were two resulting metrics: the volume increase during the past 90 days and the volume increase during the past 30 days (as compared to the 18-month monthly average).

So, what were the results? During the past 90 days, those 300 companies had an average monthly messaging volume of 18% more than their monthly average during the past 18 months. During the past month, those 300 companies averaged over 30% more than they did during the past 18 months. Approximately 25% of them increased their volume by more than 50% over their monthly average.

Should you start sending more email? I’m not saying that. Often times, we coach customers to send far fewer messages in order to hone the targeting and segmentation of those messages. But, what I am saying is that your competitors are probably increasing their volumes this year, and they are likely doing it by engaging in more lifecycle marketing techniques. So, if you’re not properly automating the process of sending the right message to the right person at the right time, other brands are probably moving past you this year.