If you are serious about online marketing, chances are that email marketing is one of your staple tactics. If so, you will already have grappled with falling conversion rates as recipients have become ever more selective about the messages they are receptive to. If you are successful at email marketing, you will know that long-term success is achieved not by sending out more email, it is achieved by constantly reviewing your delivery success and open rates, increasing relevance to your recipients and refining conversion performance.

However, no matter how thoroughly you refine your email strategy and prune your house list, there is a worrying new trend that email marketers need to face up to that is whittling away at the earning potential of your house list; email usage in certain age groups is dropping, and for some age-groups, dropping like a stone.

Comscore recently released findings from their latest study on year on year change in use of email by age group in the US. This showed significant drops in usage in all age groups under the age of 55, except for the 18-24 age range who largely need an email account for job hunting, banking or other coming of age activities. The drop was described as ‘catastrophic’ in the 12-17 years age range which showed a 59% fall.

The continued surge in Social Media usage has largely been attributed to this trend and it is not just isolated to the US. Recent surveys of UK internet traffic estimate interaction with social networks amounting to as much as 25% of all page views. Facebook is currently responsible for the majority of those interactions. This is coupled with an average visit at Facebook of over 20 minutes. There is also a hard-core of social network users who leave one social network, only to visit another. It is therefore no wonder that we are seeing lower usage of email as a knock-on effect. Many younger internet users communicate solely through the messaging services of these social networks, seeing no need for an ‘old-school’ email account.

In short, these are more compelling reasons why organisations need to take a strategic approach to Social Media. We have already been told that social signals are starting to affect search engines algorithms. With internet users spending increasing time within social networks and migrating from traditional technologies such as email, we need to understand how to engage with our audience in a relevant way, translate this engagement to our business objectives and reduce our reliance on tactics that may be less profitable. For some marketers, managing that house-list might soon be a thing of the past.

Authored by Ian Cockayne