Email Attention Spans Have Gradually Increased over Past 6 Years

Posted by Chad S. White on March 8, 2017

Mobile phones, Twitter, texting, video games, and other digital era trappings have been blamed for shortening our attention spans to less than that of goldfish. You might be tempted to throw email in that bucket…but you’d be wrong. According to an analysis of billions of emails using Litmus Email Analytics…

The average time spent reading an email increased by nearly 7% to 11.1 seconds between 2011 and 2016.

Honestly, we were more than a little surprised by this. We expected to find that email attention spans were shrinking. Instead, we found that the percentage of emails read for more than 18 seconds grew to 44.4% in 2016 from 38.4% in 2011.

For all the details and for advice on how to optimize your emails for short attention spans…