Effects of message design and content on the performance of email marketing campaigns

• Autor(a) principal: Carvalho, Ana Teresa Neves de
• Data de Publicação: 2014
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10400.14/18224
• topic: Domínio/Área Científica::Ciências Sociais::Economia e Gestão

With the evolution of digital technologies, new ways of carrying out marketing communication activities have emerged. For most businesses today, the Internet is the cheapest and most effective means of reaching broader audiences, target specific market segments and guide individual consumers to the last stages of their decision making journey. Meanwhile, the development of online advertising activities such as promotional emails, display ads and social networks brought about new opportunities and challenges. Emailing, in particular, is both the number one activity of Internet users and the most prevalent form of online marketing. Email marketing campaigns are cheap, fast, highly targetable and highly customizable, and are thus claimed to generate twice as much the return on investment of other online advertising media. Marketers are thus now better equipped to monitor campaign progress, continuously adapt their messages according to audience response and measure their returns on advertising investment. But such developments still share the same crucial challenge with traditional marketing activities: How to get viewers to pay attention and respond to promotional messages in the desired way? The ability of email marketing to produce leads and sales depends, to a large extent, on email ad messages’ potential to generate high click-through rates. These, in turn, are claimed to be highly affected by message design features. Yet, extant studies have produced little evidence of such design effects. In view of this, the main aim of the present dissertation was to evaluate the effects of message design features on the effectiveness of email marketing campaigns. To this end, 43 email marketing campaigns were analyzed. Quantitative information about each campaign was analyzed with statistical means. The results of secondary data analysis and A/B test performance showed significant positive effects of the number of words and the presence of an explicit call-to-action in a message on CTR. Under the light of extant literature, which suggested opposite effects for written message size, these results indicate that although additional information may be an important factor of persuasiveness at a later stage, it actually works as an attention deterrent when email messages are first opened.