Gmail Preferred By Students, But Nothing Beats Texting
Today's high-school and college students got their first email account at an average age of 13. Most students have had one of their email addresses for 8 years and have an average of about 2.4 addresses each. But if you really want to reach these students, you should forget email. Send a text message instead.
According to a new survey from a survey from eROI, which looked at a sample of 283 high school and college students from 29 states here in the U.S., one quarter of students got their first email address so they could shop online. A much larger percentage, however, got their first address for communicating with family (81%) and with friends (52%).
We had always heard, anecdotally, that the only reason teens today would even bother signing up for an email account was so they could register with social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook. However, 36% of those surveyed said they use email alerts to stay on top of what's happening on the social networks. In other words, they don't just create emails to sign up - the emails actually become a part of how they interact with the networks they join.
When it came time to pick their email provider, Gmail was the clear favorite. Nearly one-third (32%) of college students choose Gmail, while 19% use Yahoo, 18% use MSN/Hotmail and about 17% use their school email.
How Often They Check the Inbox
Students also regularly check their email inboxes. More than two-thirds of students say they check email at least once per day, and 55% of those check more than 3 times per day. This is especially interesting when you compare this data to that that came out of the Pew Internet Project (PDF) only a few months ago. In that study, Pew found that half of corporate employees checked their email constantly, while only 32% of those who work in small businesses did.
Comparing those numbers with the data on the students seems to imply that the only people who become email-obsessed are those for whom email is the major, and sometimes only, form of communication. That's definitely the case in big corporations where the people you need to speak to are buildings, cities, states, or even half a world away. For everyone else, there are other alternatives. In small businesses, for example, there are probably more chances to have face-to-face time. For the students there are social networks and, of course, text messaging.
Mobile Communications
Only 12% of students currently check email on their mobile, but eROI predicts that number will increase quickly, especially given the recent explosion of smartphones on the market. In the meantime, though, it's text messaging that remains supreme with 37% selecting that as their preferred method of communication. Email is second at 26% followed by social networking IM (15%) , IM (11%), and social networking email (11%). We're also surprised to see social networking networking email rated last - we always imagined students using social networks more for communication purposes. Then again, it appears that the survey neglected to ask about Wall posts and profile comments - those are also important ways to communicate. We wonder where they would have fit in.
In the end, the survey finds that students do use email - perhaps even more than we realized - but if you really want to reach them, you should do it via text or IM. For marketers, this means that the easy method of sending out newsletters and coupons to mass email lists may become a thing of the past - only 16% of students read marketing email. Companies will have to come up with new ways to to advertise to this demographic. May we suggest social media?
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This is so true; as a 23 year old recent college grad this is all still true in our generation.
The best part of all this, is that text messaging actually costs money, while email is free. The simplicity of texting really drew a crowd as explained in Brand Hijack by Alex Wipperfurth ( a must read)
--Matt Wilson
It's brutal to see the misspellings on survey graph.
Texting once, maybe twice, is effective to drive students to other sites. Remember, discretion. If you're not sure what to do, ask 'em.
@Mike: I know - it's really surprising...and makes me question how much faith we should have in their data.
Pretty small sample, no?
Sarah - great article, and Mike - you are very right. We double-checked our spelling, but didn't catch that until you commented on the misspelling in our chart. We will fix that. Thank you. We went to painstaking lengths to get good, clean data, so a misspelling really doesn't reflect bad data or conclusions from our study. Sarah - you'll get corrected spelling on our chart in a couple hours. Also, Jeff Mills, our Email Analyst, will comment to give more background on our sample size and how we got the data.
Ryan Buchanan
CEO, eROI
www.eroi.com
The phone/cellphone is missing in the preferred methods of communicating. I wonder how that would have fared.
FYI - they sent me a new chart w/o the misspellings...
Good question Jan. There are many options for communicating we didn't cover. However, as, the title states, we wanted this survey to be about how students communicate ONLINE. Therefore we included SMS, but not phone, snail mail, or ringing your doorbell.
Mitchell
eROI
I would be fascinated to see how this data applies to the 22-28 year old demographic. Young people that grew up with a computer and the internet at their finger tips, but are now out of college, in the working world. Students don't spend all day sitting in front of a computer, the young professional does. My hunch is a very large majority of young corporate professional check their email multiple times a day. For people who got their first email address when they were a kid (for whatever reason), email is an integral avenue of communication. Further, with high levels of smart phone penetration among this demographic sms texting and email are slowly becoming ubiquitous.
@Susan
I, too, would like to see data for ages 22-28. I'm a 27 y.o. software engineer. I leave my email client open all day. I detest text messaging on so many levels, but email I can handle.
The party sending a text message has higher return receipt expectations than the email sender, yet lacks the confidence to vocally express an interest.
Our email addresses are our identity more so than a telephone number or social networking scheme. We were the first to register our email addresses, so our names aren't cryptic chains of letters and numbers meant to uniquely identify that we're somehow the 18th paul at gmail or what-have-you.
As a professional, when my work day is over, that's it, no more computer, please! Talk to me, person to person, and don't make me think, hunt, or interpret meaning from a poorly written 150 character tweet.
"Companies will have to come up with new ways to to advertise to this demographic. May we suggest social media?"
Good luck with with that! No one's figured out how to advertise via social media (aside from the obvious ad placements on social media websites, which aren't very exciting) without being branded (pun intentional) as a spammer or abuser, as far as I know. Hiring people to pretend to like your product is unethical and/or illegal and/or shameful, and having a product presence in social media per se seems just silly. Although actually it would be interesting to know what the demographic would think about, say, being friended by Coca-Cola...