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Millennials and Email – The Numbers

As email marketers and communicators, we see the virtual Pandora's box of social media grow by the day. And we see millennials and social media presented as having a codependent relationship of sorts, where one feeds off the other. And this much-hyped symbiotic relationship between millennials and social media is said to portend the death of email or, at the very least, formidable struggles for organizations without a "strong social presence" with gazillions of followers or that magic mojo to get millennials' eyes off their small screens for a few seconds, much less consider our messages and organizations worthy of thumbs-up emojis.

If you're panicking, you're not alone. But rest assured, the generation with the overused label, people born between the early 1980s and the late 1990s, use email – a lot. And they like it. In fact, they use email more than any other generation. And for millennials who go online, guess what their top online activity is?

Welcome to the first article in a two-part feature with illuminating snapshots, both statistical and real-life, on email in the everyday lives of millennials.

Research

The Pew Research Center's landmark 2010 study found that email is the top activity for online millennials at 96 percent, followed by using search engines at 92 percent and looking for health information at 85 percent.


Five years and many new social media and networking tools later, email remains at the top. A 2015 study by the Media Insight Project, an initiative of the American Press Institute and the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research, asked millennials: "Which of the following activities, if any, would you say you do regularly online? Please select all that apply."


As you can see from the numbers, despite the apocalyptic media declarations about the death of email, email is far from dead. It's alive, well and a major part of people's online lives. Check out the first-hand perspectives of millennials from recent interviews.

Additional Reading

Millennials and Email – The Voices (Part 1)
LISTSERV at Work - Issue 4, 2015

Millennials and Email – The Voices (Part 2)
LISTSERV at Work - Issue 1, 2016


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