Disclaimer: Contains shameless plugging and awesome charts!
Like most people with taste, you probably prefer Peter Jackson’s cinematic masterpiece to Amazon’s let’s-keep-throwing-money-at-it version of Lord of the Rings. Us too!
Now, you came here, you saw the line chart, and it didn’t take you long to understand what’s happening. And that’s what charts are all about!
Bar charts, pie charts, or scatter plots–it doesn’t matter. Since our brains process visual data in a different way than they do text, we find it easier to absorb information via charts.
They:
- Simplify complex data
- Are eye-catching
- Bring more clarity
- Drive points home more effectively
- Do the talking for you
All those reasons and more are what make charts a great tool for email-based communication. Whether you’re an ecommerce brand and are sending one to a potential customer after they abandoned their shopping cart or a department head communicating with stakeholders, you can populate your digital missives with well-constructed charts to improve comprehension.
Below, we’ll start with use cases where a charting tool immensely improves email communication. And then we’ll direct you to a tool to beat all charting tools–one that will automate charts in emails!
Power up Your Email Communication with Charts
Make your emails more user-friendly, paint an accurate picture, and deliver double the impact with less words with charts in the following cases:
1. Hi-Velocity Decision-Making
You need a decision-maker to greenlight a new strategy or modify a current one, based on real-time data. But the situation’s time-sensitive and you cannot wait for the monthly report to reach them. Provide a compact snapshot and help them see the right picture at the right time–with charts.
2. Beefed up Customer Engagement
From product roundup to welcome messages when you convert clients, you can customize all kinds of recurring emails. But throw in charts, showing individual clients how they interacted with your brand, and your customer engagement whooshes up to another level!
3. Juiced up Client Interactions
Want to let the client know how deep your understanding of their business or product goes? Use charts to demonstrate accurate performance. Then lay out your strategies to net them even better results. When you automate charts in emails, you also give the recipients a chance to review the data in advance. That way, when you finally have a meeting, they’ll know what questions to ask to make the session more productive.
4. Glassified Transparency
Whether you want your team members to know how well they did against their KPIs or send a status report to a client, don’t bombard them with sheets and sheets of figures or rambling reports. Reduce the clutter with succinct charts that demonstrate for you. This should also keep miscommunication to a minimum since there will be less back and forth between both parties.
5. Smart Resource Consumption
When you automate charts in emails, you end up saving time and resources. A one-time report parameters setup is all it takes, and you can focus on other productive tasks.
Hi-Octane Automation of Charts in Emails via Image Charts
Image Charts isn’t just any old chart making tool with a bevy of graph types for you to put to work, including:
It also lets you send charts as image attachments in emails.
More importantly, though, it makes it possible to automate charts in emails. For instance, you can put together a zap that creates a chart and sends it off attached to an email whenever someone modifies a spreadsheet.
Since all this happens via Zapier, you will have a range of options to use as data sources, such as Google Sheets, Excel files, etc., and to send your email, including Outlook, Gmail, etc.
Let’s create a zap that pulls data from a spreadsheet (Google Sheets), creates a bar chart (Image Charts), and emails the graph (Gmail):
- Begin to automate charts in email by logging in to Zapier.
- Create a zap by choosing an event that triggers the creation of a chart. I used the same sheet as the data source, new row addition as the trigger, and bar chart from the chart type options.
P.S. You’ll have to log into your Image Charts, Gmail, and Google Sheets accounts if you intend to pick the same options I did.
- When you generate a bar chart, Zapier will spit out a URL. Check it out to see if the graph’s to your liking before moving on to the next step.
- Test each step to check if they all work.
- Set the sending of the email as your last step of the zap. I used Gmail and got the graph in my inbox in under a minute!
- And that’s how you automate charts in email. Now whenever you–or others with access to your spreadsheet–alter the data in some way, Zapier will send a new Image Charts graph to the recipients of your choice.
Conclusion
Since Image Charts has made automating charts in email soooooo easy, why stop at just one sheet? We say paper the town with well-made graphs and raise the level of recurrent reporting that you do!
FAQs
1. Can you put a chart in an email?
Email may have its uses, but it also has its limitations. So, you can put a chart in an email after rendering it as an image manually. Or, you can integrate Image Charts with Zapier and automate charts in emails.
2. What is the purpose of using charts?
Charts help you pack more data and info into one visually attractive figure that’s also easy to understand. They take less space and are ideal for comparing different data sets.
3. Why should I automate charts in emails?
You should automate charts in emails because you only need to set it up once and can reap the benefits countless times! Additionally, email is a ubiquitous form of digital communication–that means if your recipient has the internet and an email address, they can receive your message no matter where they are. Finally, email communication is usually free, less time consuming, and highly likely to reach a recipient.
