4 Marketing Charts You Should Be Excited About

I have blogged before about how much I love MarketingSherpa—and perhaps what I love the most is their “Chart of the Week” subscription. Well, imagine my excitement when they posted the marketing charts that industry peers deemed the most valuable in 2015. You can read it here, but let me tell you the highlights as they apply directly to the nonprofit sector as well as other industries:

Via MarketingSherpa

Consumer’s Preferred Communication Channels
Email and postal mail are the top two preferred channels over other channels (10 of them). So, the next time someone says mail is dying, you might want to share with them that it is the second-highest preferred channel for communication across consumers. Now, unfortunately, social media and phone calls fall into the middle of the pack, which gave me pause. What this tells me is that, as marketers, we have still not learned the right way to communicate with consumers about our businesses via social media.

Via MarketingSherpa

Subject Line Length and Average Read Rate
Gosh, this is a bit of a mixed bag—which tells us something as well. For years we’ve heard differing opinions on the length of the subject line: too long is bad, too short is bad, etc. In this chart, it is obvious that sometimes shorter wins and sometimes longer wins. This is a clear message that it’s more about what the subject lines says than how long it is. Now, with that said there are some clear “losers,” so take a look and compare them to your control subject-line lengths.

Via MarketingSherpa

Promotional Email Frequency
Yep, the scariest question of all—how often do consumers want to receive promotional emails from companies they do business with? Well, I’m not sure if this was multiple choice or if they used this as a summary data-point on the graph—but, I’m not a fan of the “at least monthly” option, because I think it doesn’t get at the level of detail we really need as marketers. So, if I just ignore that, I have a significant number of people who say "at least weekly" and "weekly." There are some people who say "daily," "twice a week" and "three times a week," but I’m pleased that general consumers are really comfortable with weekly, according to this. I’m also a big believer that it’s what you are emailing that makes this a better statistic. If you are staying relevant and personal, then your weekly emails should be doing just fine.

Via MarketingSherpa

Communication Thoughts by Age Group
Once again, email is out in front, followed by postal mail. But take some time to get into some of the old myths—the 65-plus age group has email and mail pretty much tied for preferred communication channels. I bet that is a surprise. There’s a stair-step from youngest to oldest for postal mail, but for people 35 and older, postal mail is still preferred over all other channels outside of email. Also, take a look at text and social media—clearly we are not doing a good job of bringing along the older generations with these two options. We’ve got to keep working on that one.

These are fantastic charts to have at your fingertips as you work across channels in your own organizations.