There’s been some buzz about the death of email among America’s youth, but there’s also data to contradict that notion. Here’s one such stat, courtesy of a new Fluent study [download page]: Millennials (18-34) are 63% more likely than their older counterparts to say that promotional emails impact their purchase decisions most or all of the time.
Indeed, 26% of 18-34-year-olds said that was the case, compared to just 16% of Americans aged 35 and older.
Looking at the stats from another angle, Millennials were almost as likely to say that promotional emails impact their decisions most or all of the time (26%) as they were to say they never impact their decisions (32%). By comparison, Americans aged 35 and older were more than twice as likely to say they’re never impacted by email (36%) as to claim an impact most or all of the time (16%).
In fact, Millennials ascribe more influence to email than to other digital channels: almost half (48%) say that promotional emails impact their purchase decisions at least some of the time, topping that level of impact for social media ads (44%), ads on news and entertainment websites (44%) and promotional text messages (42%).
These results align with MarketingCharts’ own primary research into purchase influencers. In the latest edition of our popular study, Advertising Channels With the Largest Purchase Influence on Consumers, we found more Millennials saying they’d been influenced to make a purchase in the prior 6 months as a result of opt-in emails than of social media ads. On a generational basis, Millennials were close behind Gen Xers as the cohort most influenced by email marketing, with Baby Boomers and Silents bringing down the average for the overall 35+ crowd. (Purchase the study – including an accompanying Excel workbook detailing the full survey results by gender, generation and household income – here.)
So maybe it’s worth shelving the concerns over email for the time being. As one report put it last year, B2C email marketing is very much “alive and kicking.”
And as a new study from Brightwave notes, Millennials prefer email over all other channels for brand communications…
About the Data: The Fluent survey was conducted online among 2,960 US adults, including 1,769 Millennials (18-34) and 1,191 adults aged 35 and up.
