College Students Not Using School Email Accounts
We keep close tabs on how college students and recent graduates use email because our biggest product by revenue is our targeted email campaign product. The trends are interesting and not well understood by many of the employers with whom we speak.
A common misconception by the employers is that the best email address for students is the address provided to them by their schools. Wrong. That is probably the worst address to use when trying to deliver emails. In addition to many of the schools having anti-spam filters that are lousy because they incorrectly identify a lot of legitimate email as spam, the systems are often archaic and sometimes even require the students to login in the on-campus computer labs. Today's students have a mobile lifestyle and are used to much more advanced email systems which are web-based. They simply don't tolerate archaic technology, nor should they. Boston College understands this and just became one of the first colleges in the nation to abandon its email system and is now helping its students shift over to Gmail.
A recent survey by eROI looked at how college students and recent graduates communicate digitally. As we've been seeing for years, most have multiple email addresses. The survey put the mean at 2.4 and indicated that the average student acquired their first email address 8 years ago at the age of 13.
Most interesting to me, though, was that students identified Gmail as their clear favorite for their primary email service:
- 32% of college students use Gmail as their primary email address
- 19% select Yahoo Mail
- 18% pick MSN/Hotmail
- 17% use their school email address as their primary address
- 14% use another address as their primary
So what does this mean for organizations who are trying to reach today's college students and recent graduates via email? You better be sure that you or your vendor are sending those emails to personal email addresses such as Gmail and not their school email address. When students register with CollegeRecruiter.com and opt-in to receive targeted email messages from our clients, we purchase from consumer marketing organizations additional data on those students such as their personal email addresses. So if a student registers with a .edu email address, we will know that they also have a Gmail address and we'll deliver your emails to the Gmail address. Far more of the emails get through and far more are read.
Tip of the Hat: Art Koff from RetiredBrains.com for bringing this information to my attention.
Things have definitely changed on college campuses. It used to be the place where people got their first email address. Then it was the place where they had the best email, and now it's hampered in a zillion ways compared to what they already have already been using for free.