Still Targeting Younger Customers? A Field Experiment on Digital Communication Channel Migration

When encouraging customers to migrate to a digital communication channel, companies often factor age into their targeting strategy. Both the popular press and scholarly work generally believe that younger customers are more likely to opt into communication digitally. However, our empirical evidence from a large-scale field experiment shows that younger customers are not more likely to migrate to a digital communication channel. Besides, we propose two IT-embodied factors to better target customers in the context of digital communication, namely individual digital activeness and information seeking intensity. We find that customers with higher individual digital activeness, or those with lower information seeking intensity, are more likely to migrate to a digital communication channel. Our study thus offers implications for companies to focus more on customer IT-embodied characteristics instead of age.