Every few years, someone declares email dead. They’re still wrong – but something has shifted with younger audiences, and pretending it hasn’t is the fastest way to lose them.
This isn’t a “kill your email program” piece. Email is still the highest-reach, highest-ROI CRM channel for almost every retailer. What’s changed is the role it plays in the lives of customers under 30. If your CRM strategy is built on the assumption that younger audiences read email the way Gen X does, you have a problem you can’t out-subject-line your way out of.
What the Gen Z email data actually shows
Pull the latest benchmarks from Klaviyo, Mailchimp, and Litmus and a clearer picture emerges:
- Gen Z open rates are broadly similar to Millennials on a per-send basis, sometimes slightly higher but click-through rates are meaningfully lower [~15-25% lower on average].
- How Gen Z uses email is the bigger shift. Most younger users treat email as a notification surface, not a reading surface. They open, scan, and decide in seconds. Long-form newsletters underperform; transactional and reward-style emails outperform.
- Inbox anxiety is real. Multiple surveys (including [Adobe’s Future of Email] series) show younger users are more likely to keep large unread counts and use the inbox as an archive rather than a queue to clear.
- Preference for brand comms is fragmenting. A meaningful share of Gen Z respondents in recent [Statista] and [Sprout Social] studies say they’d prefer SMS, push, or social DMs over email for non-receipt brand communication.
None of this means email is dead. It means the assumptions baked into how most retailers run their email programs were calibrated for an older audience.
Email isn’t dead – it’s just not enough alone
Three things are still true about email:
- Widest reach. Almost every customer has an email address. The same is not true of any other channel.
- Highest average ROI. Industry studies (including the DMA and Litmus annual reports) consistently put email ROI in the [$30-$40 per $1 spent] range. No other channel comes close on a pure dollar basis.
- Best for narrative content. Newsletters, educational sequences, brand storytelling email is still the right shape for the message.
What’s also true: inbox competition is brutal, and the timing model is broken for younger cohorts. The customer opens email in batches, often hours after a send, and only the strongest hook survives the scroll. Time-sensitive offers (flash sales, expiring vouchers, restock alerts) routinely miss their window.
What younger audiences actually respond to
Across the channels most retailers have access to:
- SMS. Industry open rates of [~95%] and read times within minutes. But trust friction opt-in rates are lower, and overuse burns the channel fast. Best for transactional and high-urgency messages.
- Push notifications. High CTR when used well, but they require an installed app and as we covered in the in-store experience piece, retail app retention is brutal.
- Social. Best as a discovery channel and a community surface. Not a CRM channel for known, identified customers you don’t own the audience.
- Mobile wallet. Passive, native to the phone, no inbox to fight through, no app to install. The pass lives on the lock screen and updates in real time. Open rates aren’t a meaningful metric the pass is always visible to the customer when relevant.
The channel diversification argument
The brands winning with Gen Z aren’t replacing email. They’re adding channels that work alongside its stacking surfaces so the message lands somewhere even when the inbox doesn’t deliver.
Mobile wallets sit cleanly in that stack because of what they aren’t: not an inbox, not an app, not a social feed governed by an algorithm. There’s no spam filter. No carrier middleman. No engagement signal to lose. The pass is on the customer’s lock screen because they chose to put it there.
That makes mobile wallets a natural complement to email, same CRM triggers, additional delivery layer, higher visibility for the moments that matter most (offer expiry, tier change, in-store proximity).
How Litecard fits the CRM stack
From a CRM operator’s perspective, Litecard is an additional delivery channel, not a replacement program. The triggers, the segments, the offer logic all of those stay where they are. The wallet pass is fired by the same events that currently send an email.
- Same data model. Wallet passes are triggered from the CRM and CDP you already run Klaviyo, Salesforce Marketing Cloud, Braze, Emarsys, Segment, and so on.
- Same offer logic. Birthday rewards, win-backs, tier changes, restock alerts whatever your email program already does, the wallet program can mirror.
- Higher visibility. Lock screen, not inbox. No subject line, no preview text, no algorithm.
- Real-time updates. A pass can change after issuing a new offer, new tier, new expiry without resending anything.
For more on how this layer pairs with the physical shop floor, see upgrading your in-store experience with mobile wallets.
The practical takeaway
If 90% or more of your CRM touchpoints are email, and your customer base skews under 30, that’s a concentration risk. Not because email has stopped working – it hasn’t but because the failure modes of email are at their worst with the audience you most need to engage.
The fix isn’t to abandon the channel. It’s to make sure the most important messages, the time-sensitive ones, the rewards, and the in-store moments have a second path to the customer that doesn’t depend on whether they opened the inbox today.
