Under Electronic Marketing Influence

Sammanfattning: Marketers today frequently make use of electronic newsletters when communicating promotional content to subscribing consumers. Consumers receive so many of these newsletters that the chief objectives of an electronic newsletter has become to merely be granted attention by the receiver. In electronic newsletters, as well as in other marketing messages, marketers, knowingly or not, frequently compose appeals that call on the receiver of the message to skip exhaustive cognitive procedures and associate cues with previously held beliefs. Researchers have long studied the effect these mental shortcuts, called influence principles, have on consumers' behavior and two of them, social proof and supply related scarcity, have especially well-documented positive effects. However, a gap in the research exists as no studies have explored the effects the influence principles have on electronic newsletters; a gap this thesis bridges. The main purpose of this thesis is to explore the effects social proof and supply related scarcity appeals, in the subject line of an electronic newsletter, have on open rates. The effects are explored for different types of communicated content as well as for products with different levels of involvement and different underlying purchase motivations. A qualitative content analysis was conducted to discover what commercially intended electronic newsletter content types B2C marketers make use of in Sweden. Marketers are found to communicate special offers, sale- and promotional information via electronic newsletters. A quantitative study then made use of these results and compared the differences in respondent-reported levels of interest for the message as well as desire and intention to open the message for neutral subject lines as well as for subject lines signaling social proof and supply related scarcity. This was done with the help of a questionnaire. The results indicate that the explored influence principle appeals do not generate higher levels of compliance from consumers. In spite of this, results reveal that different electronic newsletter content types and different product types that messages refer to, do in fact affect reported levels of interest, desire and intention.