Insights
Every Generation Has Picked Email, Even Gen Z. Here’s Why.
Even though email's obituary keeps getting written, it's far from dead. Even Gen Z prefers it. Here's how and why it keeps living on.
Every year, someone writes email's obituary. Text was supposed to kill it. Then social media. Then whichever app was trending at the given time. And year after year, the inbox keeps showing up for work.
This year, it showed up with a promotion. In Backstroke's Fall 2026 consumer survey, 63% of shoppers said email is their preferred way to get discounts, deals and news from their favorite brands. That's up 7 points from our 2025 survey. Over the same period, text/SMS slipped from 26% to 24%, and social media dropped from 14% to 11%.
Email only found more favor with consumers. Here's what that means for your program and why Gen Z is a major part of the story.
Email Still Eats SMS
If SMS were eating email, our numbers would point the other way. Email gained 7 points year over year while SMS lost 2. Shoppers who prefer email outnumber those who prefer text by more than two to one . . . even as each generation remains phone-obsessed.
One reason is that SMS has become a harder channel to run. FCC rules now require brands to honor opt-outs sent "by any reasonable means," including replies like "stop," "quit" or "cancel" within 10 business days. Texas SB 140 expands the state’s strict telemarketing laws to cover marketing texts. Plus, carrier fees keep raising the cost of every send.
Though marketers have more hoops to jump through when sending an SMS, it doesn’t make that messaging medium useless. In fact, it’s still great to send texts for special occasions. Flash drops, shipping alerts and back-in-stock notices can serve as short, urgent messages with a clock on them.
Meanwhile, email is your generalist messaging solution. It carries more content, reaches more people, costs less per message and gives you room to tell a story.
While you can still give SMS the urgent moments, you should give email the space to build a relationship.
Gen Z Actually Reads Email
Gen Z’s attention is harder than ever to earn, yet email generally earns it just fine. When we broke channel preference out by generation, email was the top choice for deals and news in every group, Gen Z included. Half of Gen Z shoppers (50%) picked email, more than SMS (21%) and social media (11%) combined. Older shoppers lean even further toward email, topping out at 75%.
Part of the reason Gen Z still cares about email is because their digital lives run through the inbox. Every app sign-up, order confirmation, shipping update, return label and loyalty account lives there. To buy anything online, you need an email address. While younger shoppers may discover items on TikTok Shop, their order confirmations, restock alerts and the loyalty perks are all communicated via email.
So once you're in their inbox, what earns Gen Z's attention? Honesty, a voice that sounds like a person, real customer photos and values backed by great reviedws they can check.
5 Tips to Write An Email Gen Z Actually Opens
Design for the thumb. 67% of Gen Z shoppers will read your messages on a phone. Use a single column and big tap targets. Put the key offer above the fold. Test in dark mode before you send.
Write for the AI summary. Apple Intelligence and Gmail's Gemini now summarize emails before anyone opens them. Put your offer and the reason to care in the subject line, preheader and first sentence, in plain language. If a summary can't tell what you're offering, your subscribers won’t care enough to figure it out on their own.
Swap studio gloss for UGC and creators. Real customer photos and reviews read as more trustworthy. That authenticity is a differentiator in a world of AI slop, with 47% of Gen Z saying they dislike AI-generated social content and prefer human-created material.
That being said, if you do choose to use AI-generated people, disclose it. New York's Synthetic Performer Disclosure Law penalizes brands if they don’t. We broke down the new AI disclosure rules for email here.Personalize from zero- and first-party data, while being open about it. Use quiz answers, browsing and purchase history to tell people why they're seeing something. "Because you bought…" feels like a helpful recommendation. Unexplained precision feels invasive. Opt for the former.
Predict winning content. Gen Z is selective about which brands enter their inbox. Klaviyo found that most Gen Z consumers keep their brand subscriptions to between just 3 and 5. Predicting which creatives will resonate with that age group, will give them a reason to stay subscribed.
What Email Trends Win With Every Age Group?
In the title, we stated that email has consistently won with every generation. Shifting the focus back to all age groups, here’s a look at how to ensure you win the inbox, no matter whom you’re sending to.
Opens are out; revenue per recipient is in. Apple Mail Privacy Protection loads tracking pixels automatically, which inflates open rates. Measure clicks, conversions and revenue per recipient instead.
Deliverability is enforced, not optional. Google and Yahoo require bulk senders to authenticate with SPF, DKIM and DMARC, offer one-click unsubscribe and keep spam complaints under 0.3%. Microsoft began enforcing similar rules for high-volume senders to Outlook.com addresses. If your authentication isn't in order, your best email may never reach the inbox.
Flows do the heavy lifting. Flows make up just 5% of your sends but drive 40%+ of your email revenue. If you're auditing your email program, start with improving your abandoned cart, browse abandonment, welcome and post-purchase flows.
AI personalization works at scale. AI can now tailor content and creative for each subscriber. Predictive Hero v2 is on the way to do just that. Our next prediction model uses richer audience groupings, built around six demographic dimensions, to match hero images to different subscribers.
Machines are sorting the inbox. Apple Mail's categories and the AI summaries from Apple and Google shape what gets seen first. Plus, some consumers are using AI agents to sort their inboxes. The general rule of thumb is that clear, relevant email that people engage with gets rewarded. Vague email gets filed away, by inboxes, people and machines.
Why Does Email Keep Getting More Powerful?
Email didn't survive by accident. It lives on because it’s evolved to handle most jobs within our digital lives—like confirming transactions, managing returns, building loyalty and simply telling a brand's story.
Email also builds on itself in a way other channels don’t. Every click and purchase tells you more about what a subscriber wants, which makes the next email more relevant. Social reach resets with every algorithm change, but your list and what you’ve learned from it stay yours forever. That creates value for every generation.
Backstroke uses AI to help ecommerce teams create and personalize the emails shoppers want, making the most of email’s value for every generation. See how it works.
