A psychological based analysis of marketing email subject lines

Abstract

Email has been an effective and popular communication medium since its birth in 1971 to now. The number of email users have increased from a handful to 2672 million as of 2016 and it is predicted to increase further. This enormous growth has established an effective marketing medium called email marketing. The present email advertisement revenue has reached $19,353 million, it has not reached to a significant proportion. A marketing email becomes a success only if the email is opened and read by the receiver. The subject line of an email and the email address of the sender are the main deciding factors for one to open an email or leave it. Sentiment analysis is a popular research area which uses natural language processing, text analysis and computational linguistics to identify and extract subjective information in source materials. This research work analyses the email subject lines in a psychological point of view, for their effect in a person when he/she read it and the decision he/she makes to open that email or neglect it. The objective of this research is to develop methods that can quantify the psychological effects induced by an email subject line; where this quantification is correlated with the action performed by the email receiver. This research work was carried out through sentiment analysis and data mining on three large data sets, namely Enron e-mail, Spamdex Digital Spam Archive and Google Open Adwords. Based on studies in the area of sentiment analysis seven types of analysis techniques were identified and utilised in this study. These seven type of analysis are categorised into three, namely Semantic analysis, Descriptive Analysis and Observational Analysis. Semantic analysis considered the meaning of words in the email subject lines and their psychological effects in three different aspects, namely, Emotional Analysis, Subjectivity Analysis and Sentiment Analysis. Particularly for the Emotional analysis, this paper proposes nine emotions based on the Indian aesthetics over the classical opinion analysis approach. Descriptive analysis and the Observational analysis considered the subject line structure and the effect of certain word/phrases as well as the number of words and characters respectively. Email subject line analysis is a new area of research and so far did not produced any scholarly articles. This study has identified the ways in which the email subject line analysis could be taken forward and has proposed forty rules which can be used to create successful email subject lines. It was observed that the results of this study matched with a neurological study on a similar topic which mapped brain hotspot changes for emotion reflections.