Persuasive Determinants in the Hotel Industry’s Newsletter Opening Rates

Carlota Rocha Araújo, Paulo Botelho Pires (), Catarina Delgado and José Duarte Santos
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Carlota Rocha Araújo: School of Economics and Management (FEP.UPorto), University of Porto, 4200-464 Porto, Portugal
Paulo Botelho Pires: Centre for Organizational and Social Studies of the Polytechnic of Porto (CEOS.PP), 4465-004 Porto, Portugal
Catarina Delgado: School of Economics and Management (FEP.UPorto), University of Porto, 4200-464 Porto, Portugal
José Duarte Santos: Centre for Organizational and Social Studies of the Polytechnic of Porto (CEOS.PP), 4465-004 Porto, Portugal

Sustainability, 2023, vol. 15, issue 4, 1-27

Abstract: Email marketing plays a key role in business communications and is one of the most widely used applications by consumers. The literature review points to several determinants that, when applied, increase the open rate of newsletters. This research evaluates the impact of six determinants of persuasion on the opening rate of a newsletter in the hotel industry. The determinants are the day of sending, the time of sending, subject line personalization, scarcity appeal, curiosity appeal, and authority figure. The chosen methodology focused on real experiments, using a high-end luxury hotel, and the respective customer database. The newsletter was sent to the subscriber list, where one part received the control and the other part received a variant with the test version. Ten A/B tests were conducted for each determinant. The results obtained were not in line with what is indicated in the literature review. Although the literature review yielded results that showed that the application of determinants increased the open rate of newsletters, this study obtained findings to the opposite and did not confirm what was prescribed by the reviewed literature. The results of the A/B tests were conclusive and revealed that the determinants did not increase the open rate of newsletters.

Keywords: email; open rate; email marketing; persuasion determinants; email marketing campaigns (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
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