The Personalities of Email Users
Successful email campaigns are the result of knowing your audience. When do they open email? Do they read on mobile devices? In the previous chapters we have covered the basics of building and segmenting a list. Segments are built on the attributes of data that you collect. But there is another dimension that needs to be considered: What is the email personality of your audience?
The personality reveals a new dimension to the segment. Eli Langer, a producer for CNBC’s social media team, recently posted a graphic on Twitter regarding email inboxes (see Figure 8.1).
Figure 8.1 Types of inbox management
Source: https://twitter.com/EliLanger/status/572081933452218368
Although this humorous email meme has appeared before, this was perhaps the first time it has generated a vigorous online discussion. However, what was interesting about this discussion was not that so many people offered explanations for the inbox with unread messages (e.g., laziness, popularity, bad email client, no knowledge of app badges) but rather that the notion of email user “types” clearly engaged and resonated with so many people.
Hoarder or Cleaner? Different Email User Typologies
So what do we know about different types of email users? Is there such a thing as an email style or personality? In a 2005 talk at PARC in Palo Alto, CA, Marissa Mayer said that Gmail designers discovered there were approximately six types of email users. Gmail was then designed around these six usage cases and tested within Google for two years prior to public announcement. This suggests that there may be more than two types of people in the email world, but Gmail’s designers have never divulged their results; so we must look elsewhere to attempt to answer our questions. We will focus only on typologies rooted in empirical evidence (versus typologies based on the anecdotes or personal experiences of commentators).
One of the first typologies is due to Whittaker and Sidner (1996). These researchers conducted 1- to 2-hour interviews and gathered inbox statistics from 20 office workers using NotesMail at Lotus Development Corporation. Their analysis uncovered three types of users:
• Filers:People who file their messages every day
• Pilers:People who never file their messages
• Spring cleaners:Those who file once every 1 to 3 months
Though much has changed with email since 1996, Whittaker and Sidner’s typology has held up well as a description of the basic way that email users differ in terms of email management. Dharmesh Mehta, senior director of Microsoft’s Outlook.com, summarized his team’s research in a 2013 interview with FastCompany.com by suggesting a user typology that is very similar to that of Whittaker and Sidner’s. Specifically, he suggested that users tend to be one of three types:
• Filers: These users are very organized and use many techniques to maintain organization. “They have a lot of power tools to get through their Inbox and keep things where they want them,” Mehta says.
• Pilers: They have thousands of things in their Inbox. Mehta suggests that pilers are users who may often have a sense of having missed something, “Like an important email, or something I forgot about, or something I was supposed to do.”
• Deleters: Frequently start the day by deleting as many emails as they can. According to Mehta, roughly 50% of people “. . . take about a third of their Inbox and, before they even read the mail, they delete it.”
MaCorr, an online marketing research company, recently used a slightly different approach to derive a typology. Rather than observing email behaviors and abstracting a set of user types, they predefined four user types and conducted a survey with 1,002 U.S. adults aged 18 to 65 who regularly use home and work email accounts. MaCorr asked people, “Please tell us which of the following four statements best describes your own ‘email personality?’ Consistent with Whittaker and Sidner (1996) and Mehta (2013), 95% of respondents identified themselves as typified by a focus on filing, piling (hoarding), or deleting.
• Deleter (55%): “You are conscientious and only keep an active inbox, deleting unnecessary emails and filing relevant ones. You respond to messages quickly and can be ruthless when deciding whether or not to reply.”
• Filer (30%): “You regularly start email contact, and your emails are generally light hearted. Although you do not answer immediately you would not leave it more than one day. You deal with a lot of email so use inbox folders to keep conversations organized.”
• Hoarder (10%): “You have a relaxed attitude to email. You rarely file or delete and don’t pay too much attention to how your email tone might sound. You answer to emails only when you are ready.”
• Printer (5%): “You print emails to read them and may also put them in paper files. You always reply with a prepared, considered response, so it could be that some emails aren’t answered for a number of days. You are polite and traditional in tone and language.”
Most recently, Kalman and Ravid (2015) revisited Whittaker and Sidner’s (1996) seminal typology. They monitored the email accounts of 7,745 users for eight consecutive months, gathering data snapshots every hour (e.g., number of inbox messages, number of read messages, number of sent messages, average response time, and number of unread messages). This longitudinal analysis confirmed that although users do tend to exhibit a primary “type” that resembles piling, filing, and deleting, most users also periodically switched to alternative types to cope with accumulated effects or changes in email flows.
Managing Personal vs. Work Life
Email increasingly permeates our everyday lives through the evolution of new device affordances (Dery, Kolb, and MacCormick 2014). Grevet et al. (2014) found that whereas work email volume has doubled over time, personal email has increased five-fold (with particular gains in unread messages). Although new devices can enhance communication, they also present challenges in terms of greater email volume and greater expectations of “round-the-clock” responsiveness (Dearman and Pierce 2008). These issues highlight a key dimension along which people differ: work–life integration. At one end of the continuum, there is full integration of work and personal lives such that an individual has a single social existence with no boundaries between work and personal life. At the other end of the continuum, individuals treat work and life as completely separate existences. In reality, these endpoints represent extremes and most people fall somewhere in between, with periodic shifts toward one end to the other. Matthews et al. (2009) considered the role of different devices as well as different email accounts as boundary management artifacts, and found that email users tended to use their smartphones to remain aware of work developments and to perform “triage” on inboxes, but waited to read and respond to important emails on laptop or desktop computers.
Similarly, email often serves as a vehicle for “micro-role transitions” between work and life, such as when a worker receives an email from a spouse at work or when a worker receives an email from a colleague while at home (Ashforth, Kreiner, and Fugate 2000; Capra, Khanova, and Ramdeen 2013). Additional research suggests that work environments or cultures influence integration versus separation of work and personal lives. For example Cecchinato, Cox, and Bird (2015) examined a university setting and found that while both professional services staff and academics permitted work interruptions from personal emails, only academics allowed interruptions of personal lives with work emails. The authors also found that professional services staff restricted email on their phones to personal accounts, whereas academics used their phones for both personal and work accounts. Given that work–life conflict tends to induce stress, it is not surprising that people develop strategies to minimize transitions between work and home roles. Cecchinato, Cox, and Bird (2015) report examples that include (1) using the same device to check email but segregating work and personal emails by aligning them with separate applications (presumably to reduce the temptation of checking work/personal emails outside of work/personal roles), (b) disabling work email functionality from a phone when on leave or holiday, and (c) relying on dedicated folders and automated filtering for work and personal emails.
The Personality of Email Users
The notion of personality provides another way to think about why people perceive and use email in different ways (Reinke and Chamorro-Premuzic 2014; Whitbourne 2011). Personality is one of the oldest topics of study in social science, and is defined by the American Psychological Association as “individual differences in characteristic patterns of thinking, feeling, and behaving.” Much evidence suggests that personality is largely a genetic disposition that takes similar forms across cultures but that there is early plasticity as individuals transact with their environments (John and Srivastava 1999; Livesley 2001; McCrae and Costa 2003; Woods and Roberts 2006).
The utility of personality is rooted in its ability to predict how people will behave in different situations. Additionally, recent advances in linguistics and computer science allow for accurate personality profiling based on text analyses of how people use sentiment words, parts of speech, grammar, punctuation, and other aspects of language and communication (e.g., Shen, Brdiczka, and Liu 2013; Wright and Chin 2014). This suggests two interesting possibilities: (1) Email marketers can garner important information on the personalities of their lists by simply analyzing responses to emails or other online expressions linkable by email (e.g., social media postings) and (2) email recipients are likely to infer the personalities of email marketers based on the content and construction of their emails. The practical implication is that email marketers should consider the extent to which the personality of their communications matches the personality of their recipients. Let us take a closer look at the structure of personality and then consider what it means for email marketers.
Although many conceptualizations have been proposed, the most influential and widely adopted perspective is that our personalities are comprised of five distinct and bipolar components: openness to experience, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism.
• Openness to experience: It involves curiosity, originality, insight, sensation seeking, and imagination, and includes a willingness to entertain a broad range of interests (e.g., exploring fantasies and adventure and appreciating the arts). High levels of openness to experience can manifest as delusional and unusual perceptions and beliefs about the world. Low levels of openness to experience may be expressed as particularly narrow or “black and white” thinking.
• Conscientiousness: It is characterized by high levels of thoughtfulness, goal-directed behavior, and good impulse control. Conscientious people tend to be attentive to detail, punctual, and reliable. High conscientiousness may be expressed as rigidity and perfectionism, whereas low conscientiousness manifests as recklessness and irresponsibility.
• Extraversion: An interpersonal disposition indicated by excitability, sociability, gregariousness, assertiveness, and willingness to self-disclose. Extroverts are often happy, talkative, expressive, and optimistic. High extraversion is associated with risky or intense reward seeking. Low extraversion manifests as extreme shyness, low interpersonal warmth, cautiousness, and impaired experience of positive emotions.
• Agreeableness: An interpersonal disposition characterized by trustworthiness, altruism, kindness, empathy, cooperativeness, and tender-mindedness. High levels of agreeableness may appear as submissiveness, rejection-sensitivity, dependency, and indecisiveness. Low agreeableness can be expressed as entitlement, mistrust, callousness, and aggressiveness.
• Neuroticism: It is indicated by emotional instability, excessive worry, irritability, anxiety, self-doubt, and sadness. Neurotic individuals are pessimistic and tend to ruminate over their past failures. High levels of neuroticism are associated with low frustration tolerance, insecure attachment, emotional distress, and poor coping strategies. Low levels of neuroticism appear as emotional “flatness,” even in stressful situations, as well as low-harm avoidance (i.e., lack of fear).
Our premise is that personality not only impacts how people use email technology and construct email messages but also what their preferences are likely to be in terms of receiving email content. Some examples are as follows:
• People who are higher in openness to experience will tend to be “pilers” and may be more receptive to novel or whimsical communications. In contrast, people who are lower in openness will tend to be “deleters” and may view novel or whimsical communications as flaky or purposeless.
• People who are higher in conscientiousness will tend to be “filers” and are likely to be more receptive to longer or detailed emails and are more critical of typos, grammatical errors, lapses in logic, or unclear intentions. People who are lower in conscientiousness will tend to be “pilers” and may be susceptible to risky propositions. They will also be unreliable partners in a marketing relationship.
• Extroverts will tend to be “pilers” who expect enthusiasm and energy (use exclamation points!) and will have a strong affinity for opportunities to express their opinions and inner feelings. People low in extroversion will tend to be “deleters” who eschew any efforts to arouse emotion or make “personal connections.” They need to feel that communications are happening on their own terms.
• People who are higher in agreeableness will tend to be “filers” who will expect expressions of conviviality or intimacy, such as using personal salutations, saying “please,” and expressing good wishes. People who are low in agreeableness will tend to be “deleters” who may be vocally unreceptive to email communications and other interpersonal “interruptions.”
• Neurotic individuals will tend to be “filers,” as they worry, overthink things, and keep close tabs on their environment for signs of problems or rejection. Communication with neurotics is fraught with danger since their anxieties and self-doubt cause them to find hidden meanings and aspersions in everything. They require constant and significant reassurances. People who are lower in neuroticism will tend to be “pilers” who may be difficult to offend but also difficult to engage due to their relatively flat emotional profile.
Exercise: Your Email Personality Test
Match your personality to your email behavior.
1. First, based on the definitions provided earlier, determine if you are a filer, piler, or deleter. (Hint: How many unopened emails are in your mail box?)
2. Next, read up on the formal definition of introversion and extraversion at http://psychologytoday.tests.psychtests.com/take_test.php?idRegTest=1311. Based on this description, how would you classify yourself? If you are unsure, use the Internet to search for a free self-test.
3. Now, how well do the descriptions in the last section match up with your email habits?
4. If you were marketing to yourself, what approach would you take in terms of schedule and number of emails given what you now know? Explain.
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