Incentives & Freebies as a Moderator for Opt-In E-Mail Acceptability

The inexpensive and extremely popular nature of e-mails with a large number of people using it on a daily basis has resulted in indiscriminate exploitation of the medium by spam senders. In order to control the menace of spam mails, governments of many countries have come up with strong preventive laws. This makes opt-in e-mail marketing a focus area as overcoming legal hurdles is necessary in running any e-mail marketing campaign successfully. Marketing e-mails can be seen as an interactive tool to get relevant external information. But consumers weigh costs and benefits arising out of adopting any particular method of information search. Positive perception towards cost-benefit arising out of marketing e-mails can result in permission opts-in from consumers. Extending the idea of cost-benefit perception, the study uses various incentive conditions to find the moderating impact on the relationship between willingness to receive commercial e-mails from mobile handset marketers and consumer involvement conditions for the same. The planned hypotheses were tested by conducting a questionnaire among 105 post-graduate students studying in two colleges. The results indicate limited ability of incentive conditions to function as a moderator between involvement and willingness. The paper contributes towards the advancement of research in this area and provides useful insights for campaign planners as well.