I’ll go on a guess and say you have a gmail account. chances are you have more than one. I say this with confidence knowing that gmail currently has over 1 billion monthly active users, up from a relatively paltry 425 million in 2012. it’s free, it’s fast, it’s reliable, it offers ample storage for most organizations, so it’s an excellent option for both companies and individual users.
but there are some things that prevent gmail from being a perfect system. While there is an intuitive search feature (which can be modified with search operators) to help you find your long-lost messages, there’s no real way to measure how well you’re using Gmail, even simple things like how many emails you’ve sent. and received yesterday. they are difficult to decipher. that is, until now.
Recently launched
emailanalytics provides visualized analytics to help users understand email usage, with hundreds of data points and customizable visualizations that help users interpret and react to that data.
I signed up for the free trial to check it out and found the following data points particularly interesting:
emails sent and received
The tool shows how many emails I send and receive each day, or within a given date range, so I estimate how much of my (or my employees’) time and attention is spent on email.
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Email breakdown by day and time
The tool provides a visualized breakdown of hourly and daily use of email. Interestingly, I found that I send the most emails on Tuesdays, but receive the most emails on Wednesdays. As is typical, my email activity hits a valley around the weekend.
Top senders and recipients
The tool breaks down your top senders and recipients, helping you clearly see the distribution of your inbound and outbound messages. I found this helpful in identifying clients who take up the most of my time.
conversation and thread statistics
You most likely have some active conversations currently in your inbox. the tool helps you understand how those conversations typically unfold; for example, how many conversations do you start and how many are you stuck in? How many emails are exchanged in a typical email thread?
word count
Oddly enough, my average email sent contains 34 words, and the average email I receive contains 77 words. this is useful for measuring how my answers compare to other people’s answers.
Response times
The app also tracks how long it takes you to respond to inbound emails, and how quickly people respond to yours.
How email analytics data can be used
so how can typical gmail users take advantage of email analytics data?
these are some of the most common applications:
- employee tracking and control: In a way, emailanalytics belongs in the same category as toggl and timecamp, applications that actively monitor the time spent and performance of employees. the app allows users to identify top email users as well as problem workers who aren’t using email as efficiently as they should.
- improving personal productivity – Some users will rely on visualized insights for their personal use, measuring how much time they spend on various email-related activities so they can improve in the future.
- Project ROI ; Still others will use the information to determine how much time they spend on each project relative to the amount of money they receive from each. If a client needs twice as much attention as another, but pays the same, it has an asymmetric ROI that must be corrected.
As this is only the first iteration of the tool, there are likely more to come. Google Analytics, a similar tool for measuring and analyzing web traffic, has undergone significant evolution over the years.
With email being such a critical function for modern businesses (and people), this tool has the power to reshape our professional lives and potentially save hours of work each week. perhaps soon, all the communication methods we use on a daily basis can be analyzed in such an objective way.