Is Email Dead?

Whether email is dead or not appears to be due, in part, to which generation you belong to.  the G.I. generation, Baby Boomers, and older members of Generation X still seem to pay attention to email and rely on it as a means of communication.  Younger GenXers and Millennials, however, seem to be relying more heavily on text messaging, Facebook, and other forms of social networking to communicate with one another.       

Even among older cohorts, reliance on email as a means of getting your message out can be a dicey prospect.  For one thing, many people have more than one email address.  Which one you have in your database can be a reflection of your relationship--perceived or real--with that individual.  In addition, people may establish separate email addresses to compartmentalize various aspects of their lives--work, family, social groups, online shopping, etc.  If the email address in your records is one that isn't checked frequently, or is used only for specific purposes, the chances of your message being read or acted upon drop significantly.

For younger users--who comprise the bulk of prospective and current college students--the Pew Internet and American Life Project notes that email is no longer considered 'cutting edge' among teens, and has already been supplanted by IM and text messaging.

If email is dead (or dying), what killed it?  Where is the post-mortem that would help us understand why a medium with such power moved from being a "must-have" in marketing and communication to being passé?  And if it's true that email is no longer a vibrant means of reaching teens and young adults, why are so many different industries, including higher education, still relying on it to reach their target audiences? 

Can we breathe life back into email and make it a useful tool for reaching audiences (from teens to grandparents) again?  Should we even try?

Tiffany Young asserts that email can be relevant if marketers and others who use it make an effort to ensure its relevance and timeliness for the intended recipients.  She relates her own experience in using email to reach teens regarding a new game for Nintendo's Super Paper Mario for the Wii, which included creating a "wedding announcement" for two characters that would appeal to anyone familiar with the game.  Young also appears to have done a small amount of research, using MySpace to post a question on email use among teens.

Interestingly, the one comment on Young's article both refuted the claim that email can be relevant and provided an interesting strategy to pursue in reaching the youth market:

Having two teenagers in the house and after a great deal of discussions and Sherlock Holmes-style research, email won't do it, no matter what the kids actually say to you. At this point, these kids generally believe that "privacy settings" actually give them privacy, and that when someone "friends" them on MySpace or Facebook that the person can be trusted with whatever information or secrets these kids post online. Neophytes. For online marketers to penetrate this online culture, the marketer has to be integrated into the social media and its representatives have to find their ways onto the "friends lists" of certain kids. Marketers must start certain discussion groups and then find ways to post things on large numbers of kids' "walls" in order to be heard. If it's not on the "wall" you're not communicating.

So which is it?  Is email dead, or is there hope for its resuscitation?