Roughly half of American adults with access to a digital device and who use email continue to use the the first email address they ever had, according to results from a YouGov survey [PDF]. That includes 37% who not only use that address but consider it their main account, per the report. The results show that adults hold onto their email accounts for a long time – or that many have yet to have theirs hacked.
One might expect that youth are more likely to hold onto their first account, but that’s not the case. In fact, almost half (45%) of respondents ages 55 and older still use their first email address as their main account, compared to roughly one-third of younger respondents.
These results are interesting to marketers – even B2B marketers. The value of a personal email address has been demonstrated in recent research, which showed that about half of C-suite executives at enterprise companies use their personal email address when registering to download content. These results suggest that those personal email accounts are likely to remain valid for quite some time – making them particularly valuable to marketers given the high level of churn among target personas.
Overall, roughly three-quarters of the adults surveyed use either 1 (35%) or 2 (38%) personal email accounts.
Among 18-34-year-old email users with access to a digital device, 44% report having first started using email some time between the ages of 10 and 15.
Not surprisingly, that figure drops dramatically among older respondents who didn’t grow up with digital. Instead, most (61%) 35-54-year-olds first started using email after the age of 21, as did 95% of respondents ages 55 and older. Read the rest at MarketingCharts.com.
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