Ive decided to talk about the level of automatic personalisation certain companies are now able to deliver through digital marketing, advertising, spam and otherwise. Digital marketing and largely thanks to email, has grown exponentially since emails became popularized in the early 2000’s.

Pavlov et al (2008) estimated e-mail marketing campaigns produce approximately 2x the return on investment of the other main forms of online marketing such as Web banners and online directory advert. Why is this? Its a combination of multiple factors such as:

• People check their emails on a daily basis
• email subject lines can be easily misleading
• luck
• subscriptions with ones email account

Im going to quickly analyse the last point above regarding subscriptions. With more and more services being offered online everyday (plane tickets, bank transfers, video conferencing etc) they all share one thing in common which is ones email address.

Over the past few months I have been continuously bombarded with Emails, banners and a few popups from EasyJet.  They have been sending me deals, promotions, offers and everything in between based on my previous destinations bought through their site. For example, were I to click anywhere on the email besides the 3 destinations EasyJet proposed, I would be regardless redirected to the EasyJet homepage, touting yet more destinations that Ive been to, asking me whether i would like to return for the amazing price of a 4 bananas and some change. Companies, using our email addresses, are now able to gain a whole new level of insight thanks to Big Data.

If one were to compare internet advertisement not even 4 years ago, you would probably be inclined to agree that its main USP was to be the most visible, obvious public ad as possible. They would be generic color bombs that one would ignore more often than not. Today, not so much. Google has begun to find advertisements that truly interest me, filtering out the worst of get rich quick from home schemes.

I would love to see if Easyjet, using 5 years of my data, would be able to send me promotional emails containing destinations I have not been to, as well as, and here is the tricky part, give me an explanation why it would think I would enjoy visiting said location..

reference :

Ellis-Chadwick, F., & Doherty, N. F. (2012). Web advertising: The role of e-mail marketing. Journal of Business Research, 65(6), 843-848.