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  Respondents to my email newsletter surveys seem to skew older than target demographic — how much can you extrapolate from the data?

  Posted by seohelper on March 3, 2021 at 6:45 pm

  

  I recently ran an email survey to readers of our organization’s email newsletter asking about reading habits and preferences, as we’re doing a newsletter redesign, and was kind of surprised that the majority of the 300 respondents were white men 55 or older. I know they definitely represent a portion of our audience, but they’re ultimately not the primary audience we want to be targeting going forward.

  Other professionals in my field (research/media-adjacent) commented that they’ve seen similar patterns to surveys they send out, and chalk it up to the fact that older folks and retirees have more time on their hands and are more likely to fill out a survey.

  **So, how much stock would you put in survey results like these in the context of the redesign? Have you seen similar patterns in responses to surveys you’ve conducted?**

  I don’t have enough of a stats background to say whether the responses from other demographics were large enough to be statistically significant. I’ve segmented out responses from younger and non-white-male readers and have seen some divergences from the majority group, but they’re not drastic. (For example, all age groups state they prefer “3-5 sentence summaries” of articles, but the 65+ age groups second-highest preference category is “full text” and the 25-34 group second-preference category is “longer summaries”).

  seohelper replied 5 years ago 1 Member · 0 Replies
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