Email and Search Both Popular Among Online Adults
An interesting survey released yesterday by Pew Internet revealed that email and search are the most popular activities among adults who are plugged into the Internet world. As an Atlanta SEO Agency, we are incredibly interested in these statistics for many reasons, not the least important being that this survey indicates that marketing campaigns (in many cases) can be too narrow. Just focusing on search or just focusing on email keeps these campaigns from reaching as many people as it could if it maximized both mediums.
This Pew survey could change the way people undertake SEO campaigns; expanding your interactive marketing campaign to include search, email and social networking may be the best way to reach the most people. This means that, though many of us can get caught up in concentrating on search marketing, we should still be saving some marketing energy for the email space.
More About The Pew Internet Survey
Pew began conducting these surveys in 2002, and has continually found that email is just as (if not more) popular as search. Done from April 26th to May 22, 2011, Pew surveyed 2,277 people, all 18 or older. Although search marketing continues to evolve, anyone who has counted email marketing out has been losing out on a substantial audience. Things have not changed much over the last 9 years, as among the representative sample of adults, on a daily basis email is used just as much (if not more, in some cases) as search is.
This is the chart from the Pew Internet survey. You can view more survey findings here.
As you can see, email and search are practically tied for use by the representative sample of adults used in the survey. What may even be more interesting is the habitual usage of both: “Perhaps the most significant change over that time is that both activities have become more habitual. Today, roughly six in ten online adults engage in each of these activities on a typical day; in 2002, 49% of online adults used email each day, while just 29% used a search engine daily.”
Why Does This Matter?
The compelling statistics found in the survey are that, “92% of online adults use search engines to find information on the Web, including 59% who do so on a typical day. This places search at the top of the list of most popular online activities among U.S. adults. But it is not alone at the top. Among online adults, 92% use email, with 61% using it on an average day.”
The survey delves into demographic differences within both search and email usage, as differences among the sample of adults existed along age, race and income lines. The most important thing to glean from this survey is that while many of us can get caught up in the search world and the machinations of Google, Yahoo and Bing, we should not neglect email (or social media, which according to Search Engine Land’s Danny Sullivan, is used by 65% of internet users – this information comes from another Pew survey) when it comes to getting our businesses out there and visible to our target audiences.
Get More Information
To learn more about Atlanta SEO agency EverSpark Interactive, email marketing or SEO, visit our website or come back to our blog often for daily posts on what’s going on in the Internet space. For specific questions regarding your own site’s SEO, contact us at 770-481-1766.
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