Managing unwanted emails could be costing UK businesses more than £34,000 a year, according to Mailprotector, a cloud based email security, management and hosting specialist.
The analysis looked at the time spent on managing spam, phishing and other unwanted emails. 150 businesses were involved in the in the analysis over a 30-day period. On average, each employee receives 25 unwanted emails per day, which takes up around 5 seconds of an employee’s time to open, glance at and delete, which equates to almost one working day each year (6.94 hours).
For employee costs, based on an average annual salary of £28,000, as well as factoring in support desk costs, losses can add up to a total figure of £34,229.17 per year per company. Download time and other costs related to affected networks and hardware are not included in this figure and so could equate to a much higher result.
Scott Tyson, sales director EMEA, Mailprotector says:
”When you start looking at the number of unwanted emails we get every day, it really starts to add up. While it may seem like seconds to delete each one, we’re actually spending several hours a year. Once you then add in the cost of support calls, either to an internal help desk, or, for most medium-sized businesses via a third party IT supplier or services company, the costs really start to go up.
”For smaller companies this represents money straight off the bottom line, and for employees it is frustrating and time not well spent. The good news is that these losses can be drastically cut by having a reliable and affordable cloud-based email filtering solution in place.”
In 2014 the number of business emails sent and received per day was 108.7 billion (out of a total 196.3 billion). This figure is expected to increase at an average rate of 7 percent over the next four years, reaching 139 billion by the end of 2018, according to The Radicati Group’s Email Market Report (2014-2018) published in October 2014. Today, there are over 2.5 billion email users in total, expected to grow to 2.8 billion by the end of 2018.
Title image credit: RaHuL Rodriguez
Amie Filcher is an editorial assistant at HRreview.
