Understanding e-mail pressure: Exploring consumer behaviour and identifying consumer segments

Abstract

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.