We all use e-mails at work,home and we have our personal choices when it comes to using the email clients. Some like to access emails the old fashioned way via the website in the browser and we also tend to use a lot of specific email clients like Outlook, Lotus notes etc. at our workplaces.
The report from Campaign monitor throws some interesting and valuable insights on the email client market share and usage patterns in 2009 with a dataset including over half billion mail opens over a 12 month period.
Top Email Clients in 2009
- MS Outlook clearly leads the market share as the top email client with ~28% market share. A major reason for this could be MS Outlook being the preferred choice as an email client at workplaces. Microsoft has been putting in a lot of effort into further improving and this is clearly visible from the fact that Outlook 2007 has managed to bag ~9% (inclusive of the 28%) market share
- I am actually surprised seeing Hotmail as the second most used email client. On a personal note, i have never really liked hotmail primarily due to its pathetic spam detection
- Yahoo continues to hold its own with a decent ~15% market share while Gmail in my opinion is significantly lower at ~6% *
- Iphone (Can we get enough it already) is growing phenomenally given that it aint necessarily a standalone client. This goes to show that internet user is increasing taking to the Internet on the go and the efficient email features of iPhone are making it easier for the user
- Lotus Notes seems to have lost it completely with a marginal 1.3% market share. One of the earliest corporate email clients, IBM’s flagship product seems to be dying on accounts of being bloated and lack of any innovation in the product
iPhone3/iPod3 is catching up with the likes of standalone email clients like Outlook
I am reminded of a post I did earlier on the dominance of Apple and its products in multiple marketplaces. The increasing growth of email usage on iPhone/iPod 3.0 versions serves a testimony that Apple sure knows how to make sticky products. The report also highlights the growth patterns of email clients from early(Jan/Feb) 2009 to the end(Nov/Dec) 2009 to demonstrate the increasing/diminishing market share of these email clients
iPhone 3.0 is right on top there growing at a healthy rate with the new Apple Mail 4 growing at a decent rate too. Also, interesting thing to note here is the adoption of Outlook 2007. I speak for myself when i say this but considering that Outlook is mostly used at workplaces, this is indeed heartening to see companies migrating to an upgraded offering from Microsoft which i have not witnessed in the case of other products like IE ( a majority still run IE6) and also the OS ( Windows XP is the defacto). I am using Outlook 2007 at my workplace and it sure is far better than the earlier Outlook versions.
* The report is not without its assumptions. The numbers can be skewed due to the fact that the email client is detected only if images are displayed. Hence, this very well could be the reason that Gmail seems to have lower than expected market share since it does not allow opening of images by default.
Even with its limitations, the report sure throws some interesting insights on the usage patterns. Standalone email clients like Outlook may have it easy for a while with not much competition to them (Lotus notes is almost out of the market) but the future sure is looking towards email on the go. The recently launched iPad is going to become an addition to the list of email platforms and further strengthen the dominance of Apple products as email clients. Mobile devices fuelled by the Android OS are also expected to make their presence felt in the list of email client preferably by next year.