• by Jess Nelson , December 23, 2016

Almost a third of Americans have their emails open constantly while at work, according to a new study by ReachMail, predominantly located along the West Coast of the United States and the Northeast.

ReachMail, an email marketing company, polled 1,000 Americans who consider email significant to their work on their work email habits, and discovered that Massachusetts residents doubled national averages by asserting that 68% have their emails open constantly while at work. 

More than 50% of Americans check their email multiple times a day, according to ReachMail’s survey, while 16% of Americans check their email at most once per day. The states in which people are most likely to check their email once a day are Arizona and Texas. 

Massachusetts also ranks as the state that sends the most emails a day on average, at 28. Although nearly half of Americans send fewer than 10 emails a day, 30% of Americans send 10-25 emails a day, 16% send 25-50 a day and 8% of Americans send more than 50 emails a day.

Just over 70% of Americans check their emails between 5:00 a.m. and 9:00 a.m., with Utah averaging as the country’s earliest riser and the Northeast as its latest. Seventy percent of Americans also check their email after their workday ends at 6:00 p.m., with Virginia and Tennessee ranking as the country’s night owls.

Virginia also ranked first in the fastest email responders, with an average response time of 2 hours. New Yorkers, on the other hand, were the slowest email responders. A third of New Yorkers take at least 6 hours to respond to an email, while 12% of New Yorkers take an average of a day or more to respond. 

Overall, the majority of Americans respond to an email within one hour, while 26% respond in 1-6 hours, 11% respond 6-24 hours later and 5% of Americans take more than 24 hours.

The fastest email response time in America likely correlates to a desire to reach that magical number of 0 emails in the inbox. Over half of Americans polled by ReachMail have fewer than 10 emails in their inbox, while on the opposite end of the spectrum, 13% of respondents had more than 100 unread emails. 

A report from the beginning of 2016 by the Future Work Centre, a London-based psychological research group, found a strong relationship between work email, perceived pressure and stress. Alongside email fatigue from the increase in marketing messages during the holidays, it is imperative that email marketers mitigate stress by leveraging data to send relevant emails to their subscribers.