Email Still Essential To Business Owners: Survey Says

Everyone, it seems, is having a problem with email. In a recent GFI Software survey, 75 percent of business owners say the information stored in their archived email is worth more than $100,000. And 19 percent actually dub it "priceless." Yet, nearly half (45 percent) admit to not having an IT solution for managing or automating email storage and retrieval.

Half don't even know if their current method of storing email is cost-effective or actually admit it isn't. While cloud storage solutions are growing in popularity, two-thirds of those surveyed still use physical/manual storage solutions (storing emails on either servers or individual users’ machines).

This email hell we all live through is echoed in The Business Behavior & Email Management Project conducted by software company Oasys. The survey found that, on average, the majority of employees spend up to one hour a day looking for lost emails, 34 percent spend up to two hours a day, and 8 percent spend up to three hours daily. A miserable 2 percent admit they spend more than three hours a day seeking emails.

Why it matters to your business: Not having a good email storage solution in place wastes money, puts data at risk and wastes staff time. In addition to all that lost productivity, Oasys notes that employees’ mismanagement of email can lead to legal issues for companies: A whopping 87.9 percent of respondents admit to deleting crucial emails in their attempts to clean out their overflowing inboxes.