• by Sean Hargrave , Staff Writer, October 19, 2016

The results are in and the winner is set to be announced, but many in marketing probably won't believe it. Or rather, many people in some aspects of marketing won't believe it. Yet again, the killer app for reaching Millennials is email. For anyone who isn't a committed fan of the channel, it's hard to imagine, but research study after research study backs it up time and time again.

Despite being regularly killed off or written off, email keeps on delivering premium ROI results and engagement levels. Plus, it's a hit with that Holy Grail of a customer, the Millennial. The latest figures from Warc apply to the US, but it's fair to assume they represent attitudes in Europe too -- although some markets such as the UK may be ahead on mobile. The headline stat is that email addresses that brands use to reach Millennials are checked at least daily.

However, there are two more interesting points that leap out as the research is delved into further. First, the incidence of Millennials using a separate email account for brands to communicate with them has dropped from 40% to 30%. It's a clear indication that most have come to accept messages from companies they deal with sitting alongside notes from friends and family. And here's a curious thing -- Millennials tend to check email on a laptop or PC more than than the average consumer. While three in four, as a rough average, will check email on a computer, that leaps to nine in ten for Millennials. 

So email is still getting checked regularly, and more often than the average consumer, on a PC. Plus the Millennial habit of setting up a separate Gmail account for branded messages is on the wane. I don't know about you, but it sounds to me like the Holy Grail of marketing is far more open to email than a social media guru might like to admit. Could it just be that email, the channel that has been written off more times than anyone can care to remember, is actually the best route to reach Millennials? If there's a better route, I'd love to see it.