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Study: Business Executives Turn To Email Newsletters First For Their News

Martin Beck on June 3, 2014 at 1:27 pm

Social media might be the shiniest tool in your marketing kit, but if you want to reach business leaders don’t neglect old-school tactics.

That’s the main lesson to be learned from a recent study that found that executives use email newsletters — remember those? — as their primary source for news. Sixty percent said newsletters were one of the first three news sources they check every day. That’s twice as many as those who open a mobile news app (28%) and significantly higher than the 43% who look for news on the mobile web via browser or a social media app. Twitter (23%), Facebook (19%) and LinkedIn (12%) lagged behind.

The study, prepared by the Quartz marketing team, pulled insights from 940 executives across a range of industries, including management consulting, finance, tech and media and advertising.
The pool was balanced across age demographics with 22% in the 25-44 range, 22% 35-44, 21% 45-54, 20% 55-64 and 12% 65 and older so the results shouldn’t be written off as an you-can’t-teach-an-old-dog-new-tricks outlier.

Quartz found a very mobile-device oriented group, with 50% of respondents using mobile devices to take the survey. And they also read most of their news on mobile devices with 61% saying most of their news consumption is on mobile (41% on phones, 20% on tablets).

More interesting findings:

<75% spend at least 30 minutes a day catching up with news. And 44% say they focus most highly on news first thing in the morning.
61% subscribe to newspapers and magazines, but only 3% use print as a primary news source.
37% of executives pay for digital news, with those in the finance industry being most likely to subscribe at 47%.
91% say they share work-related content with colleagues.
When they share, 31% say use mobile devices (31% phone, 16% tablet) and 48% a desktop computer.
80% say they share interesting content via email, 43% via Twitter, 30% via Facebook and LinkedIn, 22% in person and 18% via IM or chat.

Justin Ellis of Nieman Journalism Lab has a very good analysis of the study here. Click here for the full report from Quartz.