Academic literature on the topic 'E-mail marketing messages'

Viral advertising relies on consumers' transmitting the message to other consumers within their online social media. Viral advertising is controlled by consumers and is less under the control of advertisers and brands (Petrescu, 2014). Consumers receive the link or the advertising content and pass it along through e-mail or posting it on a blog, microblog, podcast, wiki, form, webpage, and social media profile. Advertising narrative in traditional media has changed with viral ads. In the narrative of viral advertising is more emotional, romantic, humorous, sexual and contains social messages. This study was conducted to examine the Brands' viral advertising narrative. Viral advertising is at an early stage of development and much of the current viral marketing communication literature research is concerned with understanding the motivations and behaviours of those passing-on email messages. No longer the preserve of offline communication strategists, it is becoming a central platform for interactive marketing communications (Cruz & Fill, 2008).

Viral advertising relies on consumers' transmitting the message to other consumers within their online social media. Viral advertising is controlled by consumers and is less under the control of advertisers and brands (Petrescu, 2014). Consumers receive the link or the advertising content and pass it along through e-mail or posting it on a blog, microblog, podcast, wiki, form, webpage, and social media profile. Advertising narrative in traditional media has changed with viral ads. In the narrative of viral advertising is more emotional, romantic, humorous, sexual and contains social messages. This study was conducted to examine the Brands' viral advertising narrative. Viral advertising is at an early stage of development and much of the current viral marketing communication literature research is concerned with understanding the motivations and behaviours of those passing-on email messages. No longer the preserve of offline communication strategists, it is becoming a central platform for interactive marketing communications (Cruz & Fill, 2008).

Progressions in communication innovation have offered ascent to the development of another electronic manifestation of verbal spreading that is Viral Marketing (VM). VM is kind of marketing strategy that sways people to share a promoting message to everyone via web or other electronic media. As of now, Viral Marketing Communication (VMC) is still acknowledged being at an untimely period of improvement. In this way data about its conduct and extent has yet to be plainly set upon and decided. Also, constrained exploration has been carried out on shopper recognition and reaction to such prompting method. The objective of this study is to conduct an inquiry into consumer/buyer receptivity, perception and behavioural reaction to the discussed moderately new promoting technique via VM. With the use of in-depth interviews conducted with 15 people and small interviews with other 27 people, the study analysed their perception towards five methods through which Viral Marketing can be implemented, they are 1) E-mail, 2) Video 3) Blogs, 4) Facebook, Google+, Twitter-Social Media Portals and 5) Forums. Qualitative research has been conducted to analyse the assumptions/hypotheses and found valuable findings in regards to the way buyer/consumer behave to traditional word of mouth and e-W-o-M (Viral Marketing). The qualitative findings from the study show that VMC increases consumer's awareness but it does not have a vital impact on the buying decision, Consumers have different trust and credibility to five junctions of VM; “Forums” have highest trust and credibility among the discussed five junctions, Consumers do not take VM as spam messages, Service based VMC have higher impact than the product based VM, Negative VMC has a higher influence on consumer than the optimistic one, and Financial Benefit is not the strongest reason to spread the messages via VM. These findings will provide new bits of knowledge on VM as a marketing tool from a shopper's outlook and prove to be the first venture for further study on how VM can effectively connect, join & impact shoppers and sellers.

Advergames can be defined as online games that incorporate marketing content. Initially, many companies have placed their brands or logos in the virtual environment of computer games launched by specialised gaming firms. However, this form of advergaming is rather static and ineffective, since the player is concentrated on the task required by the game and might not acknowledge the brand image displayed in the background. This limitation has encouraged the firms to create their own advergames, which are developed around a theme or a character directly related with their products and/or brands. In order to ensure a large diffusion of these games, they were made freely available on the Internet. The facilities offered by the Internet platform have increased the interactiveness of the game, and have added a viral marketing dimension. Viral marketing describes any strategy that encourages individuals to pass on a marketing message to others, creating the potential for exponential growth in the message’s exposure and influence. The use of advergames corresponds well to a strategy of viral marketing, which incorporates the following principles: 1. Give away products or services 2. Provide for effortless transfer to others of these products/services 3. Scale easily from a small to a very large audience 4. Exploit common customer motivations and behaviours 5. Utilise existing communication networks to transfer the products/services, or messages about them 6. Take advantage of others’ resources (existing users/customers) The interest in advergames has substantially increased in the last 5 years because of its perceived advantages (FreshGames, 2002; WebResource, 2004): • Low-cost marketing in comparison with the traditional advertising channels, such as TV and radio • A captured audience that can transmit valuable personal information about its demographic profile, behaviour, needs, attitudes, and preferences • Customer retention: the average time spent in an advergame is 7 to 30 minutes, which cannot be reached in the case of a classical TV advertisement • Viral marketing: 81% of the players will e-mail their friends to try a good game All these data demonstrate the huge potential of advergames (Rodgers, 2004). However, despite the hype created by this new advertising method, most of the information describing or debating advergames is professionally-oriented, often written in an advertising style (DeCollibus, 2002; Hartsock, 00 ; Intrapromote, 2004). Very few academic studies have been initiated to investigate the characteristics of advergames, and their influence on consumers’ perceptions and behaviour (Hernandez, Chapa, Minor, Maldonaldo, & Barranzuela, 2004; Nelson, 2002). This article attempts to identify, based on the existent professional literature, the specific characteristics of an efficient advergame, and to verify the existence of these characteristics in 70 advergames that are active online.

Every email that originates from outside of an organization must go through a series of firewalls and gateways before reaching the intended recipient inside the organization. During this journey, each email may get scanned for possible viruses or other malicious programming codes. In some cases, the e-mail may also receive a score based on the possibility of spam content. On any stage of this processing email can be quarantined, or moved to a spam folder for the future possible analysis or simply deleted. Understandably, such complex structure helps secure the company’s internal infrastructure, however, e-mails have become an important tool in marketing for many e-commerce organizations and if marketing e-mails do not get to their intended receiver, the sending company will be disadvantaged. Therefore, from the point of view of the sender of an e-mail, it is important to understand the faith of the e-mail that was sent and whether it was received as intended. In this case study, we describe an e-mail bounce back system that was developed by a major e-commerce company in order to understand whether its e-mail based marketing was successful in delivering the intended message to its customers. In addition to the describing the development of the system, security and privacy issues are also discussed.

Online advertising and marketing promote the different types of products through various kinds of advertising modes to customers. Online advertising is promotional messages that show up on the monitors of online laptops, desktops, tablets, televisions, and smart phones. The main objective of the study is to analyze the online advertising and impact comparison of online advertising strategy which is adopted by Indian and Australian e-commerce companies. To achieve the objectives of this study, the authors take the sample of 5 Indian and 5 Australian e-commerce companies. This study also found that the Indian and Australian e-commerce companies are inter-connected. Online advertising in India has been flowering and also increasing because of 4G connections, which are good for the future of online marketing. This chapter explains comparisons of Indian and Australian e-commerce companies and also focuses on the top 10 platforms to increase sales and customer attraction through advertising. The future of online advertising is brilliant and unlimited.

With the advent of the electronic mail system in the 1970s, a new opportunity for direct marketing using unsolicited electronic mail became apparent. In 1978, Gary Thuerk compiled a list of those on the Arpanet and then sent out a huge mailing publicising Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC—now Compaq) systems. The reaction from the Defense Communications Agency (DCA), who ran Arpanet, was very negative, and it was this negative reaction that ensured that it was a long time before unsolicited e-mail was used again (Templeton, 2003). As long as the U.S. government controlled a major part of the backbone, most forms of commercial activity were forbidden (Hayes, 2003). However, in 1993, the Internet Network Information Center was privatized, and with no central government controls, spam, as it is now called, came into wider use. The term spam was taken from the Monty Python Flying Circus (a UK comedy group) and their comedy skit that featured the ironic spam song sung in praise of spam (luncheon meat)—“spam, spam, spam, lovely spam”—and it came to mean mail that was unsolicited. Conversely, the term ham came to mean e-mail that was wanted. Brad Templeton, a UseNet pioneer and chair of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, has traced the first usage of the term spam back to MUDs (Multi User Dungeons), or real-time multi-person shared environment, and the MUD community. These groups introduced the term spam to the early chat rooms (Internet Relay Chats). The first major UseNet (the world’s largest online conferencing system) spam sent in January 1994 and was a religious posting: “Global alert for all: Jesus is coming soon.” The term spam was more broadly popularised in April 1994, when two lawyers, Canter and Siegel from Arizona, posted a message that advertized their information and legal services for immigrants applying for the U.S. Green Card scheme. The message was posted to every newsgroup on UseNet, and after this incident, the term spam became synonymous with junk or unsolicited e-mail. Spam spread quickly among the UseNet groups who were easy targets for spammers simply because the e-mail addresses of members were widely available (Templeton, 2003).

This chapter tries to evaluate the effects of the propagation of a trust-based marketing message through selected below-the-web technologies, which are those particular types of information technologies different from websites – such as e-mails, discussion lists, BBSs, Newsgroups, Forums, Peer-to-Peer, IRCs, MUDs and MOOs – that allow for the creation of virtual communities. A preliminary experiment on informal marketing communications, carried out over 12,000 accesses to below-the-web communities and regarding the proposal to use the term “Ducks” for “Euros”, in view of its similarity with the term “Bucks” for Dollars, showed that below-the-web technologies can be an appropriate tool for building trust amongst participants when four conditions for the existence of virtual communities are met: 1) a minimum level of interactivity; 2) a variety of communicators; 3) a virtual-common-public space; and 4) a minimum level of sustained membership.

Social monitoring platforms are software services that enable the rapid analysis of massive amounts of information (mostly text messages) expressed in social networks. Their usage today mostly focuses on marketing industries that need to reach their customers in a proper way. In the e-government domain, however, such tools have mostly been used by political parties as a support to election campaigns, but few have been actually used to provide a comprehensive understanding of the citizens' needs in everyday life. In this chapter, the authors present a set of data analytics tools that can help public authorities to extract and summarize textual content from Internet forums and social media feeds. There are many potential applications of these tools, such as the visualization of the main political discussion in the city, early detection of disagreement with the local politics, and city services connected to social media.

Even before September 11, 2001, security and privacy was a concern to nearly 80% of the current and potential Internet users around the globe, according to survey released by the Information Technology Association of America (ITAA) (Poulsen, 2000). The survey, commissioned by the American Express Company, randomly polled 11,410 people in 10 countries, and found that nearly half of the respondents enjoyed some form of Internet access. As might be expected, most of the world’s Internet users utilize Internet for e-mail, browsing, and entertainment. However, fewer than 28% do some shopping online, and 24% use the Internet for banking and financial transactions. But when Internet users and non-users of many countries were asked if they agree with the statement, “I am or would be concerned about security and privacy issues when purchasing or making financial transactions online,” 79% agreed. Prior to the tragedy of September 11, 2001, U.S. citizens also expressed legitimate concerns toward the issues of privacy and security, with an 85% showing. The poll released by the Information Technology Association of America also illustrated that approximately 80% have doubts about the U.S. government’s ability to maintain computer security and privacy. Hence, protecting operating systems is a major strategic concern if the success of e-government as a whole is to reach its potential. Although most of these issues are typically not discussed in relationship with e-government, the need for trusted computing systems within e-business and computing systems can be made as an effective argument that all these issues affect e-government systems as well. Secure computing systems issues in terms of e-government are just as important. The scope of this article is to present a description of one the most generally known security certifications; namely, the trusted computer system evaluation (TCSEC) and its commercial implementation procedure in the commercial product evaluation process and discuss the influence of this evaluation/certification on the incidence of hacker attacks on e-business. As evident by the abundance of marketing literature of different operating systems for e-business that frequently refers to its security strength ranked against popular security certifications, it is very common to rank commercially available operating systems against TCSEC evaluation and/or certification criteria. This article will also explore where the many operating systems stands on this particular evaluation. In essence, given the vulnerabilities exposed after September 11, 2001, strategic security managers should be deeply concerned that the e-business platform they are responsible for contains the highest security standards to prevent any type of potentially harmful hacker attacks. Managers need to have a working knowledge of TCSEC security evaluation/certifications to become better informed when choosing the e-security platform for e-government/e-business. Essentially, the selection of a particular operating system for e-government/e-business have as much to do with factors ranging from existing skills, existing infrastructure, and economic reasons all the way up to political and strategic reasons. In dealing strategically with modern e-business environments, one of the most important factors that management must consider when choosing an operating system for their e-business platform is the security strength to resist computer hacker attacks on the operating system. If, for example, during different hacker attacks, one of the major aspects of these attacks is a certain operating system, as opposed to other systems, then this is a clear message to management to build in proper safeguards in the proposed operating system (Smith & Rupp, 2002a, 2002b). Certainly some of the reasons for frequent hacker attacks may probabilistic in terms and not random events, since Linux and Windows operating systems are more frequently used for e-commerce than other systems. So, it is not surprising that there are practically few reports of successful hacker attacks against operating systems that run e-business platforms (Smith, 2005; Smith & Lias, 2005; Smith & Offodile, 2002).