453 research outputs found

    Towards an Effective Organization-Wide Bulk Email System

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    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

    Understanding E-Mail Pressure: Exploring Consumer Behaviour and Identifying Consumer Segments

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    Commercial businesses desire to send out as many advertising e-mails as possible as with each e-mail sent revenue can be generated. This approach can lead to consumers experiencing e-mail pressure, which refers to the stress and frustration consumers experience when receiving an overload of e-mails. Previous work on e-mail pressure has studied either consumers’ behaviour or general attitudes towards advertising e-mails. This thesis contributes to the current understanding of e-mail pressure by bridging the gap between consumers’ perceptions of e-mail pressure and consumer behaviour. The first study consisted of a focus group study that explored consumer behaviour with e-mail pressure and how different types of advertising e-mails affect consumers' perceptions of e-mail pressure. The results demonstrate that consumers who experience e-mail pressure show it by opening fewer and reading fewer advertising e-mails from a single sender, and eventually by unsubscribing from future advertising e-mails from the sender. The second study was a data analysis study and investigated how consumer segments can be identified based on consumer behaviour related to advertising e-mails and e-mail pressure. Four consumer segments were identified using K-means clustering. The findings demonstrate that there exist differences between consumer segments in their behaviour with advertising e-mails and e-mail pressure. New customers and passive repeat customers show more signs of experiencing e-mail pressure and display lower engagement with advertising e-mails compared to high-engaging repeat customers. In addition, Study 1 and Study 2 demonstrate the existence of differences in how distinct types of advertising e-mails affect consumers’ perception of e-mail pressure. Consumers were found to be more likely to unsubscribe from automatic, retention, retargeting, and browser abandonment than other e-mails. Furthermore, a post-purchase effect was identified, indicating a notable increase in consumers unsubscribing during the period following purchase. The findings of the thesis research enable commercial businesses to recognize e-mail pressure occurring among their customers by monitoring consumer engagement, providing them with the opportunity to proactively act upon this. Recommendations for commercial businesses on how to prevent e-mail pressure by adjusting the frequency and content of advertising e-mails for consumer segments were given

    E-Mail Tracking in Online Marketing - Methods, Detection, and Usage

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    E-Mail tracking uses personalized links and pictures for gathering information on user behavior, for example, where, when, on what kind of device, and how often an e-mail has been read. This information can be very useful for marketing purposes. On the other hand, privacy and security requirements of customers could be violated by tracking. This paper examines how e-mail tracking works, how it can be detected automatically, and to what extent it is used in German e-commerce. We develop a detection model and software tool in order to collect and analyze more than 600 newsletter e-mails from companies of several different industries. The results show that the usage of e-mail tracking in Germany is prevalent but also varies depending on the industry

    Common Practices in Destination Website Design

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    The Internet has become a key marketing channel for tourist destinations. To identify typical features of destination websites, a content analysis of websites for top global destinations—by number of international arrivals—was conducted. Six factors were evaluated: primary focus, navigation and interactivity, visual and presentation style, textual information, use of advertising, and use of social media and travel aids. In addition, a cluster analysis was conducted to identify homogeneous groups of websites in the sample. The findings revealed three naturally occurring groups. Inter-cluster differences suggest that DMOs use different approaches to target potential visitors, as evidenced by websites ranging from purely informative and simply designed to highly commerce-oriented and visually alluring. Based on the exploratory analyses, a conventional wisdom for destination website design is proposed

    Transformation theory and e-commerce adoption

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    This thesis investigates business transformation on the Internet; particularly the nature and significance of Cyber transformation theory and the Marketspace Model as a framework for E-commerce adoption. E-commerce can raise a firm\u27s productivity, transform customer relationships and open up new markets. The extent to which nations become adopters of E-commerce is set to become a source of comparative national competitive advantage (or disadvantage) in the twenty first century
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