While we are talking about millennials, you are looking at a global cohort of consumers possessing an annual power of more than $200 billion by 2017. If you are under the misconception that emails are too old fashioned for the teenage and young adults, and social media is their most preferred means of brand interaction, then you are in for a surprise. According to a study by Adobe, Millennials are more likely than any other age group to check email from bed (70%), from the bathroom (57%) or while driving (27%).
The Reality
Being a millennial myself, I can tell you this – Marketers! We millennials prefer emails over any other form of communication, for all the ‘serious’ and ‘important’ stuff. Be it online purchase notifications, travel bookings, appointments, brand interaction or even offers and sales.
Social media has clogged our lives. There is so much noise, chaos and clutter of content, conversations with friends, news and everything else that oh, we get exhausted and by the end of the day get nauseated with it. Emails are the only systematic part of a millennial’s life, which they cherish by their lives to safeguard and keep it organized. So yes, millennials use emails, more than you could imagine.
So how to make Emails more interesting among this massive sector of consumers?
1. Adapt
Millennials adapt to technologies and brands at the speed of lightening. They want to be updated constantly and switch over to the next best technology at the blink of an eye. Millennials are more likely than any other age group to check email on smartphones, with 88% reporting that they regularly using a smartphone to check email. This calls for Emails to be responsive in design and adapted to smartphones and tablets. Millenials prefer things quick, and on the go. If you are not adapting to this gadget-dependent behaviour of millennials, then you are losing more than half of your customers right there.
2. Crisp content
Millennails have a very short span of attention, but a keen eye for details. Even though emails are the most preferred channel of communicating with brands, that doesn’t give brands, the liberty to be lax about the content that goes out. Conveying your message quickly through the subject line and making way for interesting and snackable content is the mantra to get more email open rates. Add statistics and numbers in your subject lines to draw attention from the daily clutter of 100s of emails that make way into their inbox.
3. Liberal use of imagery and graphics
Images and visuals convey messages way faster than texts. Too much text makes your email look lumpy and wordy. It’s a real put off to receive emails that are dry and without anything talking back. Images and visuals add the conversational quotient to your emails and leave a lasting impact on your readers’ mind. Use GIFs, real images, graphs and infographics to convey your brand message. These little things create a brand persona in your millennial consumers’ minds.
4. Tune in with Social Media
You can’t deny the fact that social media rules the lives of millennials today. They are either chatting or sharing pictures or snapchatting with their friends. Isolated communication will not work in your favour in that case. As a brand, social proof is your real asset and what else could be better than linking your email communications with social media? Millennials are expressive on social media and they instantly share anything that catches their eye. Make your content shareable and garner social proof!
Emails will never go out of fashion. There was a prediction that social media would leave emails outdated. But the power of personalization and the importance that emails carry will never go away.