Have you ever quietly passed judgment on friends or customers based on their Internet service provider (ISP) and ashamed afterwards for judging a book by its cover?
Well throw that shame down the drain because, according to the folks over at MailChimp, there’s plenty of incredibly useful demographic information hiding inside e-mail addresses.
In a recent blog posting titled, What Does Your ISP Say About You, the company spilled some very interesting secrets from its massive database about who uses which ISP, and why.
Here are a few of their insights that should be very interesting to casino affiliates.
Domain Demographics
MailChimp’s top receiving domains (Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo!, AOL, and Comcast) shouldn’t be too shocking to anyone who follows the Web. What is a bit shocking is the degree by which Gmail is leading the e-mail race.
The ubiquitous domain accounts for around 12.5 billion of the number on MailChimp’s radar. Hotmail, it’s closest competitor, racks up around 10 billion with the next three coming in at 7.5 billion, 1.8 billion and 1 billion respectively.
Gmail and Hotmail users median age clocks in right around 31, which is kind of a sweet spot for online gamblers. Nothing too surprising there.
AOL and Comcast pull in an older crowd with a median age of 43 and 49 each. This makes sense since when you consider most tech-forward folks abandoned AOL decades ago. Also, Comcast e-mail addresses come with service bundles that aren’t exactly popular with young people living in dorms or shared houses.
The big shocker from MailChimp isn’t just that people still use Hotmail, it’s that a lot of young people still use Hotmail. As turns out, Microsoft sponsored e-mail addresses are necessary to register for XBox Live.
That means that 31-year-old median Hotmail user is probably a mash-up of 15-year-old XBox players and 45-year-old luddites who don’t migrate e-mail addresses very often.
Browsers
E-mail is, by anybody’s definition, a legacy technology and it’s hardly the only way to communicate these days.
But because reading e-mail on a smartphone is incredibly easy, this isn’t a medium that’s going anywhere anytime soon. As much as 68% of all Gmail is opened on mobile devices, so understanding which browser those e-mail opens and click-throughs come from is pretty important.
According to MailChimp, Mobile Safari is the most popular browser across all e-mail users except Comcast. Considering the fact that Android handsets outsell iPhones by a hefty margin, this is a very interesting nugget. (Almost as interesting as the fact that millions of Internet users still use AOL Explorer.)
Putting the Pieces Together
MailChimp has also correlated user likes and dislikes to e-mail providers based on e-mail subscriptions. The takeaway here is that those older AOL and Comcast users are not all that interested in games.
This doesn’t mean you should write off @aol.com entirely, but you might have to put in a little more effort to convert them.
One of the best ways to start exploiting the demographic value of e-mail addresses is to use plenty of A/B testing.
We know that online bingo players tend to skew a bit older, so why not experiment with some bingo-friendly content aimed at Comcast and AOL users? If you’ve already got some unproven theories about your e-mail list, this is a great way of proving them one way or the other.
And as MailChimp says, “And if you ever meet a subscriber who prefers using AOL Explorer, learn more. Maybe they were frozen in ice or something.”
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