This article is a summary of the behavioral targeting study by Fional Ellis-Chadwick and Neil F. Doherty. You can get the pdf here: Web Advertising: The role of e-mail marketing.
Ellis-Chadwick F, Doherty NF, Web advertising: The role of e-mail marketing, J Bus Res (2011), doi:10.1016/j.
jbusres.2011.01.005
The authors investigate permission-based email marketing and the tactics used in this marketing strategy. Executional tactics can significantly influence the decisions and attention of recipients in this form of marketing campaign.
Permission-based e-mail marketing
The advantages of permission-based email-marketing are the following. It builds customer relationship, It has low setup and distribution costs, and so small and medium-sized businesses can use it. This form of email marketing asks the consent of users to be a part of a businesses’ emailing list. Users will continuously receive ads that they really want to receive, and spam is prevented. Spam, or unsolicited emails, have received numerous complaints in the past from users.
Research Method
The study specifies executional tactics for email marketing messages. These tactics come from the following executional factors: Length of email, frequency and timing of email, illustrations, subject line, headline, message content, brand logo, hyperlinks, interactive features, animation and personalization. For each factor, prevalence, recommendations to how this factor should be investigated, and managers’ comments are identified.
For example, for length of email, the average length is 2.4 pages and only 18 percent of all email marketing messages are 1 page short. It is recommended that to determine the most effective length for a given message, variant testing should be used. Managers suggest that promotional emails should be shorter compared to newsletters, and Easter and Christmas newsletters are important to us. Pictures also make the message more interesting.
Another example is for animation. Only 2 percent of email marketing campaigns use animation. While it can potentially attract attention, its rare usage suggests that its not as effective as one might initially think. A manager mentioned using animations before, but that did not make a significant improvement to click throughs. Yet another example is personalization, which is used by 35 percent of email marketing messages. Personalization can increase click-throughs, but the level of personalization depends on how much personal data a customer shares to the company and customer relationship stage.
For the main study, twenty retailers in the U.K. who used permission-based email marketing participated by sending the researchers their promotional emails for a period of 18 months. Over this period, an average of one email per 5 days were sent to the researchers, and a total of nearly 1000 emails were sent by the retailers. Content analysis was done towards these emails based upon the executional tactics previously mentioned.
Results
For frequency and timing, results show that 13 of 20 firms sent the most number of emails during the fourth quarter (including the Christmas season), and 5 firms sent the most during the second quarter (which includes Spring). Furthermore, there is an increase in number of emails sent as 15 firms sent more emails during the first quarter of 2006 than the first quarter of 2007. Furthermore, most emails were sent during work days (8 am to 4 pm).
E-mail subject line is composed of e-mail sender and subject matter. The participating firms showed five different types of e-mail senders, including company name only, company web address only, etc. Furthermore, 56 percent of the emails contained incentives in their subject matter. Marketing managers said that the subject lines were determined by knowing first what the purpose of the email is. If it is used for sales, then it should be short and relevant, grabbing the interest of the consumer.
The average length of the emails is 2.4 pages. Managers think that consumers “switch off” when the email is too lengthy. Sales are usually short, but newsletters are longer. Nice pictures make emails longer to to allow for space that highlights the firms’ products.
Discussion
These are just some of the results of the study, which deviates from previous related studies by investigating how a wide range of executional tactics can help email marketing campaigns. Previous studies have centralized only on tactics related to web page design. On the other hand, future researchers should investigate which executional tactics combinations should be used to make attracting consumer attention very effective.