www.abertay.ac.uk
Investigating the effects of personalisation in email on student choice Mahi Chauhan, MbR, School of Business, Law & Social Sciences, Abertay University Email: 2005857@uad.ac.uk Awareness
Aims & Objectives The aim of this study is to advance knowledge on improving the efficacy of higher-ed marketing communication through personalisation in email.
identifying needs & problems
Search & Consideration information search & development of a choice set (universities to choose from)
Choice deciding where to enrol
Figure 1: The Student Buying Journey
Hypotheses Development
Objectives: ● Conceptualise the buyer decision-making journey through the lens of the student-customer in HE.
H1: The presence of personalised content in university email positively affects student intention to enrol
● Investigate the role of personalisation affecting student decision to enrol in a university.
Marketing literature based on psychology & findings by Sahni et al. (2016) highlight the effectiveness of personalisation in affecting consumer behaviour.
● Provide insights that can help marketers optimise the nature of university-sent information to prospective students. THE FUNNEL
TRANSLATING THE BIG MARKETING QUESTION FOR HE
How to influence student decision to enrol?
Reach customers at critical touchpoints
03
CONSUMER BEHAVIOUR
01
Understand how consumers make purchase decisions
02
Figure 3: Rationale
Rationale & Gaps
The premise is that people’s motivation and ability to think carefully about an ad message vary and that their attitude can be influenced by the elements of the content of the ad message. Based on literature review, there’s also evidence for the insufficiency of understanding personalisation in a limited manner (including customer names in ad messages) as it does not garner customer engagement (Chaffey & Ellis-Chadwick 2016).
Design & Method DESIGN: ● The author aims to conduct a randomised experiment as part of a survey with a between-participant design. Personalisation, here, is understood as tailoring the email communication based on the factor the participants rank as the most important in influencing their intention to enrol. The author observes this “personalised content” or content that is changed to match the factors students cite as useful in helping them choose a university, as the independent variable (IV) and student-customers’ “intention to enrol” as the dependent variable (DV). METHOD: ● The sample size is 788 undergraduates over the age of 18 from the UK. ● The manipulation is asking student participants to specify the most important factor determining their intention to enrol in a university. ● The participants in the randomly chosen treatment group are then shown an email with a personalised marketing message based on what they cite as the most important factor for choosing a university. While, the control group is shown a standardised email without any personalised content. ● For internal validity, the contents of the emails are designed to not differ in any aspects other than the presence or absence of personalised content based on factors affecting students’ choice to enrol. ● Both groups are asked to evaluate the effect of the emails they received in terms of their “intention to enrol” on a SEVEN-POINT scale.
● To the author’s knowledge, there’s a lack of recent academic investigation into fully exploring the role of personalisation (1) in the context of a high-credence service, mainly higher education marketing, (2) on student choice, (3) through email as the platform of marketing communication. ● The author intends to specifically investigate the role of personalisation in email in the context of HE and how it can help influence the student customer. ● A key element contributing to the study’s relevance is the way personalisation is conceptualised (evidenced in hypotheses development). The author’s draws from “individual-level” personalisation (Aksoy, Kabadayi, Yilmaz & Alan (2021) and defines it to mean: 1) sending tailored marketing communication to the student customer; 2) where “tailored” information is based on knowledge gained about personal experiences, attitudes, interest and behaviours of the target student customer 3) and modified to mean “factors affecting student choice” in the study.
Abertay University is an operating name of the University of Abertay Dundee, a charity registered in Scotland, No: SC016040.