Email Marketing to Millennials: Effective B2C Engagement

So the prevailing advice to reach the Millennial market goes something like this: “If you want to reach the Millennial market demographic, put all your marketing budget into mobile advertising and social media. That’s where it’s all happening.”

And if you follow the logical next step from a 2010 Pew Reach study that said:

Millennials outpace older Americans in virtually all types of internet and cell use. They are more likely to have their own social networking profiles, to connect to the internet wirelessly when away from home or work, and to post video of themselves online.

you would logically conclude that the never-ending proliferation of new social media channels, from Snapchat to Vine and who-knows-what, would make you think that using email to reach this target market would be a waste of time.  Nope. Guess again.

Email Marketing to Millennials

Email is the original social media, and studies have shown that when it comes to dealing with brands, Millennials prefer email for a variety of reasons.

Steve Dille at MarketingLand put together an extremely thorough analysis of all this that has some compelling takeaways for marketing types to chew on and digest.  As it turns out, the “always connected” generation has one constant among all the multitude of channels demanding their attention. Email.

One point Steve makes brilliantly is that while millennials use social channels like no one else, the key here is that they are social channels. When it comes to consumer-to-brand communication, there’s an entirely different dynamic in play. And for millennials, that means email. Which means fine tuning your email marketing machine so that it resonates with the millennial market.

Read Steve’s article here.  It’s well worth it.