Dec12th

Email Marketing to the Ages

A recent survey got me thinking. It said that 61% of students (I presume that means 18 and under) “never” or “hardly ever” read marketing emails.

I started to look into it more and thought I’d outline the apparent differences within the different age groups.

The survey about students also stated that if they were to open an email it would be because they are interested in the product (60%) and are attracted to a special offer (47%). To me, contrary to what the article says about email dying as a viable marketing channel for students, this points towards the changing attitude towards email marketing.

Obviously, as this generation grows older, their attitudes will change towards marketing messages so we cannot ever base the opinions of what is going to happen on results of surveys at these ages. You can though, start to recognise a trend occurring when looking further into the age groups.

This report looks at the next age group up (18-34) and we can start to see an occurring trend within the younger age groups.

This report shows a similar trend to that of the younger generation in which they are predominantly interested in relevant emails. If this trend does continue, we will be seeing a more empowered recipient in the future who knows what they want to receive and will pay little to no attention to messages from unknown sources.

So far be it the death of email marketing as a viable channel, but more a brighter future for legitimate email marketing. In the future, the value, and the return of purchased lists within the B2C industry will lessen to an extent that it will virtually become redundant. This claim can be furthered backed up with a recent post I did called Spam 2.0.

Moving onto the older age group, we can see a definite change within their attitudes towards email marketing. Where as the younger groups seem to implicitly trust online shopping, the older generations are more cautious over this.

This survey shows that testimonials within emails will increase the likelihood of the respondent acting upon the email as it alleviates the distrust. It also cites that they are more likely to respond to emails from known senders.

From everything I have seen, I can say with some confidence that the purchase of B2C mailing lists will be redundant, which hopefully in turn will increase the responses that real email marketers get from their mailings to self built lists. At the same time, I don’t envisage a drop in use of B2B mailing lists and do actually see a use for them.

The main battle for B2B lists will be the over use of them that will eventually make it ineffective. This is something which isn’t being helped by the cheap list companies who’s list building techniques are, at best, questionable.

But what about for email marketers right now? Well hopefully you can look at the age group that your list is mainly made up of and start to make some decisions on what kind of emails you should be creating. If you’re marketing towards the younger age groups then try to keep your emails to special offers, new ranges, products, and links to relevant information or interesting articles/blogs. If you go to create an email for the sake of it; don’t. It will be much more harmful to your marketing efforts to send something that isn’t of any interest as you risk switching subscribers off.

The older generations are more focused around trust and your emails should reflect a trust worthy company as much as possible. Testimonials, well designed, professionally branded newsletters will reap rewards. Introduction text and general information surrounding the company may also provoke a positive reaction from your recipients as they get to feel comfortable with your company.

Please go through the above reports, articles and surveys for yourself though as I have omitted quite a bit of interesting information from this post and it would most definitely be worth your while doing it.