Elisabeth Goossens is Director of Brand Communications at Exclaimer, where she leads global brand narratives and research-led thought leadership. She has more than 15 years of experience in B2B technology communications and marketing, with previous roles at Canon Europe, Lenovo, Rackspace, and CrowdStrike. Elisabeth commissioned Exclaimer's When It Matters research and presents the generational data behind this session.
How every generation really uses email, and why IT policy hasn't caught up
For more insights on this webinar, read the blog post.
Most IT teams work from assumptions about how each generation uses email, and Exclaimer's When It Matters research tested those assumptions against 2,000 adults across the UK and US. One result cuts against the obvious guess: Gen Z chooses email for job applications at a higher rate than baby boomers, 36% versus 23%. Elisabeth Goossens, Director of Brand Communications at Exclaimer, and Cemal Ulgerli, IT Systems Engineer at Exclaimer, walk through the full data set in this on-demand session, which runs just under an hour.
The pattern holds broadly: every generation defaults to email once something needs to be on the record, from job applications to formal complaints.
What makes an email feel trustworthy also breaks down by generation. Full contact details rank as the top trust signal overall at 45%, followed by a professional sender domain at 44%. A consistently branded email signature sits at 23% overall, rising to 29% among Gen Z and millennials, the two generations paying closest attention to what lands in their inbox. Elisabeth's read: when that signature is inconsistent from sender to sender, it stops working as a trust signal and starts undermining the message it's attached to.
There's also a real split in risk. Baby boomers are the least likely generation to use AI (67% never do) and the most likely to question whether a message is genuine (51%). Gen Z loses an important message at the highest rate of any generation, 29%, most often because a platform deleted it or they switched devices.
In this webinar you’ll learn:
Why the assumptions don't hold: The counterintuitive findings from Exclaimer's research, and what they reveal about how different generations actually use email
What this means for IT infrastructure: If younger employees treat email as the high-stakes, formal channel, where does that leave security investment calibrated around chat tools?
How authentication and brand consistency connect: Why SPF, DKIM, DMARC, and a consistently branded email signature matter more as AI-assisted writing becomes standard
A framework to take back to your team: A practical framework for stress-testing your current governance and infrastructure assumptions
