Towards an Effective Organization-Wide Bulk Email System

Bulk email is widely used in organizations to communicate messages to employees. It is an important tool in making employees aware of policies, events, leadership updates, etc. However, in large organizations, the problem of overwhelming communication is widespread. Ineffective organizational bulk emails waste employees' time and organizations' money, and cause a lack of awareness or compliance with organizations' missions and priorities. This thesis focuses on improving organizational bulk email systems by 1) conducting qualitative research to understand different stakeholders; 2) conducting field studies to evaluate personalization's effects on getting employees to read bulk messages; 3) designing tools to support communicators in evaluating bulk emails. We performed these studies at the University of Minnesota, interviewing 25 employees (both senders and recipients), and including 317 participants in total. We found that the university's current bulk email system is ineffective as only 22% of the information communicated was retained by employees. To encourage employees to read high-level information, we implemented a multi-stakeholder personalization framework that mixed important-to-organization messages with employee-preferred messages and improved the studied bulk email's recognition rate by 20%. On the sender side, we iteratively designed a prototype of a bulk email evaluation platform. In field evaluation, we found bulk emails' message-level performance helped communicators in designing bulk emails. We collected eye-tracking data and developed a neural network technique to estimate how much time each message is being read using recipients' interactions with browsers only, which improved the estimation accuracy to 73%. In summary, this work sheds light on how to design organizational bulk email systems that communicate effectively and respect different stakeholders' value.Comment: PhD Thesi

Corporate impression formation in online communities - determinants and consequences of online community corporate impressions

This thesis was submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy and awarded by Brunel University.The purpose of this study is to gain in-depth knowledge of how the members of online communities form impressions of organisations that use online communities in their communication activities. Online impression formation has its peculiarities and in order to succeed companies need to better understand this phenomenon. In order to appreciate and evaluate an interaction, those involved in it must know their own identity. Hence, individuals as well as companies engage in identity production by trying to project a favourable impression. The process of identity production can take place in both the offline and the online world. This study focuses on the online world, more specifically on online communities, by investigating how online community members form impressions of companies that produce their identities in online communities. Technology has changed customer behaviours dramatically. People have embraced the Internet to meet and interact with one another. This behaviour is in line with the postmodern assumption that there is a movement towards re-socialisation. Online communication platforms connect people globally and give them the possibility to interact and form online social networks. These platforms are interactive, and thus change the traditional way of communication. Companies therefore have to embrace those interactive ways of communication. In the online world consumers are quick to react to communication weaknesses. Inappropriate corporate communication activities can affect the image they have formed of the company in question

Stakeholder Relationship Management in Online Business and Competitive Value Propositions: Evidence from the Sports Industry

In one hand, marketers have privileges to obtain additional information about their target markets through the online businesses. On the other hand, customers and other stakeholders have an enormous flow of information to compare between competitive value propositions, available in the market. In this market competition, understanding the customers' and other stakeholders' value anticipations would be a central success factor for marketers to prolifically develop competitive value propositions, based on understanding the customers' and other stakeholders' needs, wants and expectations. Stakeholder relationship marketing has a history, as well as further potentials to understand stakeholders' value anticipations. From this context and based on an inductive constructivist approach, this study develops insights and proposes a conceptual framework on how various sports organizations manage their stakeholder relationships through their online business platforms, in order to design and deliver competitive value propositions

High-street fashion brand communication amongst female adolescents

This thesis was submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy and awarded by Brunel University.The nature of high-street fashion brands amongst female adolescents is a combined set of fast fashion movements and early adopter demands within a compressed timeframe. This research has investigated the need for a communication plan to appropriately deliver the brand message for this sector. There are a number of information barriers for high-street fashion brands to build customer value and differentiate the core values of their brands from competitors because of 1) imbalanced strategic communication implementation particularly in the encoding process, 2) ambiguous interpretation of target audience behaviour as a key disseminator of brand messages and 3) a lack of an integrated communication approach to complement the brand building communication plan. Accordingly, there is a need for a brand building communication framework to formulate and direct the female adolescent perceived values within a limited time based on mutual understanding and shared requirements between a high-street fashion brand and its target audience. Moreover, a strategic plan using an integrated brand-building communication in the encoding process which optimises the contribution of the audience must be developed. This research has revealed that high-street fashion brands should concentrate on consumer self-construal, consumer-brand congruence and consumer-brand relationships of female adolescents in order to clearly construct brand messages which match audiences’ values and lifestyles. Due to the needs for informative cooperation amongst the target audiences, the brand-building communication strategy as a persuasive medium, which encourages audiences and prospects to initiate interactivity with the high-street fashion brand, was thoroughly examined in the empirical study. A conceptual model of a high-street fashion brand-building communication was developed and evaluated by means of design research methodology and soft systems methodology. The proposed model explains the platform of brand-building communication strategy in the encoding process for the high-street fashion market. A number of advantages are offered: Firstly, brand managers may use the model to overcome the barriers to integrate a fashion brand communication strategy. Secondly, it can enhance the recognition of fashion brand-building communication. Thirdly, the model offers an approach to leverage customer-brand relationships by means of the communication process. Fourthly, it allows the description of a holistic view of brand message construction in the encoding process. Finally, it offers a strategy to integrate online and off-line communications

How to increase e-mail marketing campaigns' credibility

Promotional e-mails are one of the most effective digital marketing tools. However, companies are still struggling with the development of e-mail marketing campaigns that are both credible and engaging. This dissertation reviewed academic and practitioners’ publications on the determinants of e-mail marketing effectiveness, namely sending details, sender and subject line and message design. Three factors were identified as being potentially relevant, but poorly understood: using brand/company name on the sender, personally addressing e-mail messages and providing the campaign’s current click-through rate (CTR) (as a measure of its social engagement). The significance of the positive effects of these variables on campaign opening rate (OR), CTR and conversion rate (CR), respectively, were experimentally confirmed through the performance of 2 A/B tests both in the health industry and a quasi-experiment on the manufacturing industry. Secondary data was collected and analysed to compare the results of both experiments with the benchmark of the respective industry. These findings can be used by brands and agencies to design more credible and engaging e-mail marketing campaigns.Os e-mails promocionais são uma das ferramentas mais efetivas de marketing digital. Contudo, as empresas ainda se debatem com o desenvolvimento de campanhas de e-mail marketing que sejam simultaneamente credíveis e atraentes. Esta dissertação reviu publicações académicas acerca de fatores que determinam a eficácia do e-mail marketing, nomeadamente os detalhes de envio, o sender e subject line e o design da mensagem. Três fatores foram identificados como relevantes mas pouco compreendidos: usar o nome da marca ou empresa no sender, direcionar pessoalmente mensagens de e-mail e fornecer informações de CTR sobre a campanha como medida de envolvimento social. A significância dos efeitos positivos destas variáveis na taxa de abertura, taxa de clicks e taxa de conversões, respectivamente, foram confirmadas experimentalmente através da realização de dois A/B testes na indústria da saúde e uma quasi-experiment na indústria da produção. Foram recolhidos e analisados dados secundários para comparar os resultados das experiências com o benchmark da indústria respectiva. Estes resultados podem ser usados por marcas e empresas de modo a criarem campanhas de e-mail marketing mais credíveis e atraentes

Camouflages and Token Manipulations-The Changing Faces of the Nigerian Fraudulent 419 Spammers

The inefficiencies of current spam filters against fraudulent (419) mails is not unrelated to the use by spammers of good-word attacks, topic drifts, parasitic spamming, wrong categorization and recategorization of electronic mails by e-mail clients and of course the fuzzy factors of greed and gullibility on the part of the recipients who responds to fraudulent spam mail offers. In this paper, we establish that mail token manipulations remain, above any other tactics, the most potent tool used by Nigerian scammers to fool statistical spam filters. While hoping that the uncovering of these manipulative evidences will prove useful in future antispam research, our findings also sensitize spam filter developers on the need to inculcate within their antispam architecture robust modules that can deal with the identified camouflages

Just public relations or an attempt at interaction? British MPs in the press, on the web and ‘In Your Face’

It is no longer sufficient for a British Member of Parliament to represent a particular party and be in a safe seat to guarantee re-election. Arguably the MP has to prove that they not only represent the party but also the constituency, and increasingly they feel under pressure to prove they take the latter aspect of the job very seriously. Therefore we find them engaging in various activities which can be described as profile building or public relations, activities which we recognize as being more consistent with the PR activities of charities and/or pressure groups. They act as campaigners, building themselves a profile through the local media, they are also increasingly using the Internet to promote themselves, their activities and a number of causes important to the MP and a section of the constituency. PR theory, especially Grunig and Hunt’s continuum and Ferguson’s relationship management theories, help explain the possible motivations for MPs using these various strategies. The question this article asks is whether this is just PR or is there a less cynical motive for this activity. In other words is it simply about vote winning, which clearly is a key aspect, or is there also a desire to increase interaction between the local electorate and their parliamentary representative

Empowering email marketing

The purpose of this dissertation is to explore an empowering email marketing strategy that marketers can use for effective, modern email marketing. It describes the strategic transformation of email marketing from one-way persuasive communication to customized two-way interaction using Pettigrew´s (1987) context, content, process (CCP) framework. Consumer empowerment is used as the specific context in which email marketing takes place, and the content and process of email marketing are examined in relation to it. Changes in the business environment, accelerated by the Internet, have shifted the power dynamic between consumers and organizations, transforming their relationship from reactive transaction to proactive collaboration. This has created a need to move beyond persuasive marketing to more interactive and tailored communication. Compared to other interactive marketing practices, such as social media or mobile apps, email seems to be stuck in old, inefficient ways of implementation. Consumers view marketing emails as annoying and irrelevant, even though marketers have better opportunities than ever before to use consumer data to tailor and target messages according to consumer expectations. The research consists of three sub-studies: a systematic literature review using inductive qualitative analysis, and two online controlled experiments using different deductive quantitative analysis methods. It evaluates real-world consumer behavior and seeks to answer the main research question: What are the implications of an organization’s adoption of an empowering email marketing strategy? The dissertation proposes that adopting an empowering email marketing strategy requires advanced first-party data management that enables interaction. Email marketing should be based on permission, and the contents of emails should be tailored to the preferences of the individual recipients, but by directly asking about their preferences rather than inferring them from observed data. According to the study’s empirical findings, content matters: relevant content and active engagement improve behavioral email marketing results (open rates, click-to-open rates, and conversion rates). The study also recommends testing email content in the marketer's own operational environment.Voimaannuttava sähköpostimarkkinointi Väitöskirjassa tutkitaan voimaannuttavan sähköpostimarkkinoinnin strategiaa, jota markkinoijat voivat käyttää tehokkaaseen, nykyaikaiseen markkinointiviestintään. Tutkimus kuvaa sähköpostimarkkinoinnin muutosta yksisuuntaisesta massaviestinnästä räätälöidyksi kaksisuuntaiseksi vuorovaikutukseksi käyttäen viitekehyksenä Pettigrew'n (1987) organisaatiomuutoksen kontekstia, sisältöä ja prosessia kuvaavaa mallia. Kontekstina on kuluttajien voimaantuminen, jonka puitteissa tarkastellaan sähköpostimarkkinoinnin sisältöä ja prosessia. Internetin kiihdyttämät muutokset liiketoimintaympäristössä ovat muuttaneet kuluttajien ja organisaatioiden välisiä valtasuhteita ja tehneet reaktiivisesta vaihdannasta aktiivista yhteistyötä. Muutoksen myötä on tullut tarve siirtyä suostuttelevasta massamarkkinoinnista vuorovaikutteisempaan ja räätälöidympään viestintään. Muihin interaktiivisen markkinoinnin muotoihin, kuten sosiaaliseen mediaan tai mobiilisovelluksiin verrattuna, sähköposti näyttää kuitenkin juuttuneen vanhoihin, tehottomiin toteutustapoihin. Kuluttajat pitävät markkinointisähköposteja ärsyttävinä ja turhina, vaikka markkinoijilla olisi aiempaa paremmat mahdollisuudet käyttää kuluttajatietoja viestien räätälöimiseen ja kohdistamiseen. Tutkimus etenee kolmen osatutkimuksen kautta. Systemaattisessa kirjallisuuskatsauksessa käytetään induktiivista kvalitatiivista analyysiä ja kahdessa koeasetelmassa käytetään deduktiivisia kvantitatiivisia analyysimenetelmiä. Työ arvioi kuluttajien käyttäytymistä todellisessa päätöksentekotilanteessa ja etsii vastausta kysymykseen: Millaisia vaikutuksia voimaannuttavan sähköpostimarkkinointistrategian omaksumisesta on organisaatioille? Väitöskirja esittää, että voimaannuttavan sähköpostimarkkinointistrategian omaksuminen edellyttää kehittynyttä, vuorovaikutuksen mahdollistavaa ensimmäisen osapuolen tiedonhallintaa. Sähköpostimarkkinoinnin tulee perustua lupaan ja sisältöön, joka on räätälöity yksittäisten vastaanottajien mieltymysten mukaan kysymällä suoraan heidän mieltymyksistään havaitun datan hyödyntämisen sijaan. Empiiristen tulosten mukaan uutiskirjeen sisällöllä on väliä: relevantti sisältö ja vuorovaikutus parantavat käyttäytymiseen perustuvia sähköpostimarkkinoinnin tuloksia (avauksia, klikkauksia ja konversioita). Tutkimus suosittelee sähköpostin sisällön testaamista markkinoijan omassa toimintaympäristössä

Knowledge Sharing Mechanisms: Characteristics and Roles in Knowledge Sharing

Ph.DDOCTOR OF PHILOSOPH