Email Most Popular Medium For Recommending Products
By Anna Johnson on December 15th, 2008A study of 15,727 people by BIGresearch has found that, after face-to-face communication, email is the most popular method used by U.S. adults to talk about products.
While 67 percent of Americans use face-to-face discussions, a significant 52.8 percent use email, followed by telephone (50.2 percent), mobile phone (29.6 percent), instant messaging (13.8 percent), text messaging (10.8 percent), online communities (8.8 percent), blogging (4.1 percent) and other (2.2 percent).
The popularity of the various channels differs between age groups, with channels such as the mobile telephone, instant messaging and online communities much more popular among those aged 18-24 compared with those in other age groups. Email, however, remains the second most popular discussion medium for all age groups except for those aged 65 and over.
While 56.4 percent of those 65 and over use the telephone to discuss products, slightly less (53.4 percent) use email!
For Internet marketers, this is a strong indication that the best way to harness viral marketing is to do so by encouraging or facilitating word-of-mouth by email.
Source: eMarketer, “E-Mail Effective with Boomers,” eMarketer, December 11, 2008
