You may have heard that email is dead and that most younger folks are ditching their email for social media communications. But this isn’t necessarily true. In the same way that we didn’t ditch paper when computers came along – we’re not ditching email either.
Check out this new research done by Merkel
Merkel which found that, despite claims otherwise, email is still a marketing powerhouse, with 87 percent of Internet users checking their email daily in 2010. And that number has been steady over the past three years. Perhaps to kill the argument that social media is overtaking email, they also found that social media users are actually significantly more likely to check their email more than four times a day, and less likely to check infrequently.
The study found that the trend of PERSONAL communication via email is, indeed dropping, but the use of email for business communication is still very, very strong.
The opportunity that this study brings up for market researchers is to find ways to hone in on what our audience wants to see in emails and what emails they will open.
Entrepreneurs have the tendency to wing it and while that’s not at all a bad thing – market research can play a critical role in helping entrepreneurs, sales and product managers learn more about what emails their customers want and then deliver on that.
