The Numbers Don't Lie—Consumers Are Moving Faster Than Ever

Everyone knows how much I love numbers. Last week I read an article by Brian Rigney in MarketingProfs and it had a compilation of statistics across several sources. My post last week was all about mobile marketing (specifically text marketing)—this week I’m focused on the overall digital experience.

The 15 stats that Brian compiled are telling us one thing very clearly. Consumers are moving very quickly and if they don’t get what they need quickly, they move on. Brian calls it “instant digital gratification,” and as marketers we need to pay attention to what the numbers are saying about today's digital consumers.

But, before you read further, count in your head up to 15 seconds. According to No. 4 below, that’s how long the average web page is viewed. It’s pretty fast. Now think of that short period of time as the opportunity to absorb and make a decision about engagement. In today’s instant gratification world, as digital marketers we had better be ready to engage our constituents quickly.

1. 55 percent of Internet users only use two or three trusted sites for their content discovery and purchasing. (Carat CCS)
2. A total of 41 percent of people say they feel overwhelmed by the wealth of choice on the Web, which makes it hard for them to make purchase decisions. (Carat CCS)
3. 26 percent of people say there is so much information online that it is hard for them to find what they are looking for when shopping online. (Carat CCS)
4. 55 percent of Web pages viewed get less than 15 seconds of attention. (Chartbeat)
5. As the amount of content is growing, consumer expectation on how quickly that content is delivered is growing in tandem. 47 percent of consumers expect a website to load in two seconds or less. (KISSmetrics)
6. 40 percent abandon a website if it takes more than three seconds to load. (KISSmetrics)
7. Pages are getting heavier—more video, more images and more content are weighing down the consumer experience. The average Web page has grown 20 percent in just six months—from 1,491 KB to 1,795 KB. (Web Performance Today)
8. Images account for 56 percent of the average page's total size—an average of 1,000 KB per page. (Web Performance Today)
9. 80 percent agree that "our customer experience is our brand." (SDL/eConsultancy)
10. 22 percent of digital marketers see user experience as the most exciting trend of the year. (Perficient)
11. 78 percent of companies agree that they would be trying to differentiate through customer experience in the year ahead. (eConsultancy)
12. There are nearly 2,000 marketing tech vendors to choose from. (ChiefMarTec)
13. 69 percent of marketers say they feel challenged by a lack of enough time. (MarketingProfs and Content Marketing Institute)
14. 30 percent of B2B marketers say they feel a lack of time to be their greatest challenge. (MarketingProfs and Content Marketing Institute)
15. 21 percent of B2B marketers say they spend 15 hours or more per week just managing marketing services vendors. (MarketingProfs and Content Marketing Institute)

Whether you are a nonprofit or an agency, these stats should be impacting how you think about your digital experience and marketing strategies. If you own the digital channel in your nonprofit, take some of these stats and test them out on your own site. If you don’t own the digital channel, then schedule a meeting with that team and start talking through how your constituents are experiencing your donation pages, your information pages, etc.

Read more here.