Despite the importance and pervasiveness of e-mail marketing, improving the effectiveness of e-mail marketing programs continues to be a priority for most businesses due to their revenue-generating potential. However, the study of e-mail marketing has been mostly neglected by academic research. More notably, the lack of holistic approaches and conceptual frameworks to tackle this challenge stand in the way of helping companies to better plan and deploy their e-mail marketing strategies and campaigns. This study addresses this issue by proposing a comprehensive model for the study of e-mail marketing effectiveness based on the hierarchy-of-effects theory. The effectiveness model is built by linking the stages of the AIDA (Attention, Interest, Desire, Action) model to the sequence of steps that consumers undergo when they interact with promotional e-mails. This approach allows identifying different partial effectiveness metrics associated with the cognitive, emotional and conative stages, which are later operationalized through key performance indicators with widespread adoption in the industry (open rate, clickthrough rate, retention rate and conversion rate). Thus, attention is linked to open effectiveness, interest is linked both to click effectiveness and subscriber retention effectiveness, and action is linked to conversion effectiveness. The stage of desire is dropped from the model because it usually takes place outside the e-mail marketing process. The study includes a practical illustration of the adequateness of the framework based on data and results from prior studies.

The rising of digital media has transformed the interactions between consumers and companies. Users' expectations have reached new heights fueled by the growth of ecommerce and smartphone penetration. In a context in which bidirectionality and personalized experiences are the new normal, email marketing is perceived by advertisers as an effective and highly profitable communication channel.Initially designed as an extension of post-based direct marketing programs, email marketing has become a key component of any advertising campaign due to its flexibility, the growing numbers of email users and the negligible cost per email sent. Moreover, recent research has proven the channel's significant contribution to overall sales. Hence, there is a growing interest from both scientist and advertisers on answering the question "What factors influence email marketing effectiveness?".The answer is relatively complex because of two major difficulties. First, it is unclear what is the best method to measure effectiveness. Second, it is required to consider a great number of intrinsic and extrinsic variables in order to determine their absolute and relative importance. Even though previous research has focused on particular stages or influence factors, the goal of this work is to adopt a holistic approach in order to obtain a unified theoretical predictive model for email marketing effectiveness.Considering this, the research has been structured in five stages: introduction to the topic, theoretical framework, research design, analysis and conclusions. These stages have been developed throughout nine chapters: the first one is covered in chapter 1, the second one in chapters 2 to 4, the third one in chapters 5 and 6, the fourth one in chapter 7 and the last one in chapter 8. Chapter 9 gathers the bibliography used through the research.Chapter 1 presents a brief introduction to the email marketing environment, followed by the statement of the research problem, articulated through a set of primary and secondary objectives. Then, the influencing factors and current approaches to the analysis of effectiveness are presented, hierarchy of effects and cultural dimensions models are succinctly described, and the relevance of the research is justified.Chapter 2 deepens on email marketing through an exhaustive literature review. First, different methodologies to measure effectiveness are described and a new unifying multi-staged definition is suggested. In addition, all influencing factors identified to date are listed, followed by the proposal of a taxonomy to articulate them.

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