This article was published in 2025 and references a historical event from 2015, included here for context and accuracy.
- Tension: We chase new channels obsessively while the most effective communication method sits quietly in everyone’s inbox, largely ignored by innovation-focused marketers.
- Noise: Platform hype cycles and “email is dead” narratives distract from understanding what customers actually want from brand communication.
- Direct Message: Customer preference data from a decade ago predicted today’s reality: permission-based, value-driven communication beats algorithmic visibility every time.
To learn more about our editorial approach, explore The Direct Message methodology.
In 2015, MarketingSherpa surveyed over 2,000 Americans about how they wanted brands to communicate with them. The results were definitive: 72% preferred email as their communication channel of choice, far outpacing the second preference of postal mail at 65%.
A decade later, as marketers scrambled through TikTok strategies, BeReal experiments, and whatever Meta’s latest pivot demanded, those preference numbers proved prophetic.
Email’s open rates have actually improved, averaging 21.5% across industries in 2024, while organic social media reach continues its freefall toward irrelevance.
The 2015 data revealed something marketers spent the next ten years trying to complicate: people want to hear from brands they care about, in a place they control, with content that respects their time.
Even then, email wasn’t the shiny new channel — it was the workhorse, quietly delivering results while attention chased whatever came next.
The attraction of permission over interruption
The 2015 survey captured a moment before algorithmic feeds fully dominated digital life. Back then, 48% still wanted direct mail, 34% didn’t mind TV ads, and fewer than 20% expressed interest in text messages or social media communication from brands.
What seemed like channel preference was actually something deeper: people wanted communication they could control.
Email offered what no other channel did then or does now. You decide when to open it. You can save it for later. You can search for it when you need it.
The brand can’t change the algorithm and make their message disappear. Your attention isn’t competing with fifteen other posts in a feed designed to maximize engagement at any cost.
The tension wasn’t really about email versus other channels. It was about permission versus interruption, about customer control versus platform control.
Email represented the last digital space where the relationship between brand and customer wasn’t mediated by a third party optimizing for their own interests.
When 90% of respondents said they enjoyed emails from preferred brands, they were expressing something beyond channel preference. They were saying they valued relationships they could manage on their own terms.
A decade later, as brands watch their organic social reach crater and discover that building an audience on rented land means accepting whatever terms the landlord imposes, that 2015 preference data looks less like consumer research and more like prophecy.
The pattern has been consistent across platforms: build an audience, then watch algorithmic changes steadily reduce how many of those followers actually see your content unless you pay for visibility.
Chasing shiny objects while ignoring actual signals
Between 2015 and 2025, marketing discourse became dominated by platform hype cycles. Every new social network promised to be the next essential channel. Marketers who questioned whether they needed a Clubhouse strategy or a BeReal presence risked seeming out of touch.
The noise wasn’t just loud but insistent: adapt or die, move fast or get left behind, the kids are on this new platform and you need to be there too.
This created an environment where actual customer preference data got drowned out by speculation about future behavior. Yes, email was what customers said they wanted, but surely that would change once they discovered Stories, or Reels, or whatever came next.
The assumption was that preference would follow innovation, that customers would want whatever platforms created.
The opposite happened. As social platforms optimized for engagement over user experience, as algorithmic feeds made it harder to see content from accounts you explicitly followed, as ads and sponsored posts proliferated, email’s value proposition strengthened.
The inbox became a refuge from the chaos of feeds designed to maximize time on platform rather than deliver value to users.
Meanwhile, the “email is dead” narrative persisted despite mounting evidence to the contrary. Marketing publications breathlessly covered each new platform while treating email as legacy technology, something you maintained but didn’t invest in.
The disconnect between what customers said they wanted and what marketers focused on became a chasm.
What the data was actually telling us
The most reliable indicator of future customer behavior isn’t speculation about emerging platforms but clear statements about current preferences, especially when those preferences align with fundamental human desires for control and value.
The 2015 survey results weren’t just snapshot data. They revealed stable preferences rooted in how people actually want to interact with brands.
The strong preference for email over other channels wasn’t expressing temporary enthusiasm for a trendy medium. It was describing a relationship model: regular, expected, value-driven communication in a space customers controlled.
The fact that more than three quarters had made purchases influenced by email, and half found abandoned cart reminders helpful, showed that effectiveness followed preference.
People didn’t just prefer email theoretically; they acted on it. The 6% who always completed purchases after cart abandonment emails, and 7% who converted when discounts were included, demonstrated that the channel delivered measurable results precisely because it aligned with customer preferences.
Building on permission rather than chasing attention
The lesson from that decade-old data becomes clearer each year: sustainable marketing builds on permission, not interruption.
Email succeeded then and now because it operates on opt-in principles. People gave brands permission to enter their inbox, and they could revoke that permission instantly.
This created accountability. Brands that sent valuable content kept their audience. Those that abused the privilege got unsubscribed.
Social platforms promised reach without permission. You could potentially show up in anyone’s feed through the right combination of content strategy and algorithmic favor.
But that reach was always borrowed, always subject to platform changes, always competing against increasingly sophisticated engagement optimization.
The collapse of organic reach on platforms like Facebook proved that building on rented land meant accepting whatever terms the landlord imposed.
The survey respondents who requested shorter, more personalized emails understood something that took marketers years to fully grasp: value matters more than volume, relevance matters more than reach.
When 28% wanted more promotional emails while 20% wanted fewer, they weren’t contradicting themselves. They were distinguishing between emails that added value and those that wasted time.
Email’s persistence as the preferred channel reflects a broader truth about digital communication. People want relationships they can control, content that respects their time, and communication that delivers clear value.
Those principles don’t change with platform trends. They’re fundamental to how humans prefer to interact with organizations they’ve chosen to hear from.
The marketers who recognized this in 2015 data and built accordingly spent the next decade with a sustainable competitive advantage. Those who chased algorithmic visibility discovered that attention built on interruption dissolves the moment the algorithm changes.
The channel preference data from 2015 wasn’t predicting the future. It was describing stable human preferences that would remain constant regardless of platform innovation.
A decade later, email still works because it’s still what people want. Everything else has been noise.
