Not that I’m going to take a marketing document as gospel, but marketers are certainly motivated to find ways to get “in” and prove that their widget is the best. So when I saw this out of eROI, I thought, well of course an email marketer is going to be pushing email, but looking at what they have to say suggests that there might be something to pay attention to.
First:
When students choose a primary email service, Gmail is the clear favorite. 32% of college students use Gmail as their primary email address, 19% yahoo, 18% MSN/Hotmail and only about 17% use their school email address as their primary address.
Second:
83% of college students use Facebook, 65% use MySpace and 21% use LinkedIn.
Lastly:
Preferred means of communication for college students are text messaging (37%), email (26%), social networking IM (15%), instant messaging (11%) and social networking email (11%). Only about 12% of students check email on a mobile device. … mobile device usage [is] increasing, however it is still not at a mass adoption rate.
So what does this mean? Well, for me it suggests that what many University administrators have felt for a long while (that school email is not a primary email) is true and that txt is indeed the preferred method of communication. But if most students are fans of Gmail, then maybe there might be a way to leverage the “Labs” features within Gmail to help get information out – RSS feeds are certainly a start. Make them available for your students and they might just see your information along with the other feeds that are running across the top of the screen.
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