How to Improve the Performance of Email Marketing Campaigns? A Field Experiment Using the Authority Principle to Improve Email Performance

In marketing, authority figures are often used to convince the audience: think of the doctor in the white coat or the professor recommending a product. Some of these techniques can be translated to the world of email marketing, which sparked our interest to see if recipients are more eager to open an email when it is send by the CEO of a company. For this project, we collaborated with a digital marketing company and run two randomized field experiments: examining if a small change in the email design – adding CEO to the sender line – has an effect on performance. Our results indicate that organizations can use authority figures to improve the performance of their email campaigns. However, there might be important differences between target groups, suggesting that specific audiences are more easily seduced by job titles than others.