Marketers love numbers. Especially numbers that will amaze their clients with their grasp of the global impact of, you guessed it, email.

1. If email was a country, its 1.4 billion users would make it the largest in the world. Bigger than China, bigger than the populations of the USA and European Union combined.
2. 247 billion emails are sent each day. That’s one email every 0.00000035 seconds.
3. In the time it takes you to read this sentence, some 20 million emails entered cyberspace.
4. Every second, the world’s email users produce messages equivalent in size to over 16,000 copies of the Complete Works of Shakespeare (assuming a 30KB average email size).
5. $13.4 billion: the number of direct marketing US dollars forecast to go on email in the US in 2009.
6. $583 billion: the return from that investment if you use Direct Marketing Association figures on email marketing ROI. That’s four times the market value of Microsoft.
7. 181: the number of marketing emails it would take to produce enough revenue to buy one share in Microsoft.
8. 83,689,738,832,367: the number of marketing emails it would take to produce enough revenue to pay the US National Debt.

Wow! It’s good to be the king.