I receive and send hundreds of emails a day and use four different email accounts to keep my personal, professor, business and consumer identities separate. In generational terms, I am a digital Neanderthal. The average high school or college student uses 2.4 emails a day according to eROI. Students, on average, read marketing emails on a “rarely to never” basis, with 61% falling into this category, says the report. Only 16% are reading marketing emails on a frequent basis, while 66% of students rarely or never take action on marketing emails.
I completely change my habits when communicating with Millennials. To reach my daughter and son quickly, text is the only way to go. My teaching assistants? Facebook messages. I once sent my TA’s Amazon gift certificates to their email address. It took a suggestion to their Facebook account to look for it before they even noticed.
So what are those two emails a day about? According to eROI, it’s probably got something to do with their parents. 81% got an email address for communicating with family. Students are now using email primarily to sign up for social networking sites (25%) and receive email alerts (36%) to keep up to date on what’s happening on their social networks. What’s clear is that email for marketing to this generation is dying, dead and buried. And who can blame them, with Cisco’s latest Annual Security Report showing that 90% of email is spam.
New research among Millennials from Pace University says there may be a way to make email marketing more relevant by making it more like, well, social media.
The study of Generation Y consumers – also known as Millennials, finds that this age group would potentially welcome direct brand interactions through email, but wants more ability to control, organize and manage the interactions. Gen Y consumers are eager to see “innovative services” that allow them to better control, organize and manage email coming from brands. 78% would like their email client to automatically categorize and delete expired promotional messages. 62% would like communicate directly with retailers about their favorite products in exchange for getting the best prices from them. 44% say they’d subscribe to an email service that collected and summarized multiple offers of interest to them. 32% say they’d share promotional email offers with members inside a social network and open emails from others.”
Personally, I wonder if email is the right place for ‘organizing brand interactions’. Social media seems more flexible and has more sharing potential. The Pace research seems to confirm this may be more appropriate, with 51% of Gen Y respondents saying they’d “join a separate social network dedicated to managing brand interactions.” This sounds like a major opportunity for marketers. Anyone listening?
