In the online world, turning your customers into your marketing force means having customers that will initiate and pass along positive email messages about your product or service to others. Consumers are influenced by information they receive from other consumers trough interpersonal communication like email. A person can communicate with a larger number of others, more quickly and more easily via email than many of the other channels. Passing along an email message is even easier than writing one’s own comments. Furthermore, pass-along email seems particularly well-suited for the spread of images and/or verbal content that is too detailed to be spread in what has traditionally been known as word of mouth. However, email saturation and misuse (spam) have put a serious dent in response rates. Consumers are often quick to hit the delete key when they know the message is from a marketer. They are much more reluctant, however, to delete a message from a person they know.

In Online consumer psychology – Understanding and influencing consumer behavior in the virtual world, the authors separate the email users into Viral Mavens and Infrequent Senders. Viral Mavens received and sent pass-along emails frequently while Infrequent Senders are less avid about sending these emails along.

A 4 week study gathered 1,259 pass along emails from 34 people with some interesting results. Viral Mavens believe that email brings great value to their lives. They feel that they are able to pursue friendships that would not survive without email. For the most part, Infrequent Senders consider that email has changed their lives also. They feel that email has made them more productive, efficient and brought them closer to their friends and families.

A very interesting finding was the way people perceive the senders of these pass along emails. Both Viral Mavens and Infrequent Senders had positive feelings towards the senders and their sending motivations (desire to humor others, superstition, entertainment, altruistic motives and many more).

It is intriguing that the motivations attributed to senders were so positive, even though the experience of receiving pass-along emails can be negative at times. Perhaps the perception is so positive because both Viral Mavens and Infrequent Senders think that pass along emails originate from people with too much time. Some of the senders may be motivated to spread the word for use in social exchanges and to benefit family, friends and acquaintances. If the email is sent by a marketer they automatically think the message has some sort of mix between a commercial proposition and manipulation.

Another reason for perceiving pass along emails from friends and acquaintances so positive is “Someone is thinking about me!”. A message from someone you know has a touch of personal info because that someone knows you. A standard message from a marketer has no personal info because they don’t know to much about you and making 100,000 custom messages takes more time and resources that a single standard one. Something like “Hey Ashley, how are the kids? I found a new perfume at the mall yesterday. Its fragrance is similar to the french perfume you bought in Paris last year and I know how much you like that perfume.” will probably generate positive feelings towards the sender. Something like “Dear Ms./Mrs. Flaminlove4mybeaver@whatever.com. Skunk Labs is proud to inform you that a new perfume has been launched yesterday. You can purchase it in all the HappySquirrel malls across the country and if you tell the shopping assistant that you’ve received this message and give him your email address for verification you get a $5 discount. Sincerely, Lab Skunk!” will probably generate negative feelings.

Moods and mindsets also influence the way people react to pass along emails. If they feel rushed or if they are having a bad day at work, they report frustration or annoyance. However, many people were quick to state that the negative feelings that they do experience do NOT color their perceptions of the senders.

The fact that people receive pass-along email messages does not necessarily mean that they open all of them. Both Viral Mavens and Infrequent Senders find it quite easy to distinguish pass-along emails from other types of messages by virtue of a quick scan of the email queue. If they see Fwd: Fwd: Fwd: in the subject line or if they recognize the particular sender of the email. These immediate cues of sender and subject line can quickly inform consumers that they have received a pass-along email before they even open the message.

Sender name was most commonly cited as the determinant of whether a pass along email was opened or immediately deleted. Respondents commonly open emails only if they are from somebody they know. However, knowing the source can also trigger the automatic delete decision if the sender is perceived as someone who sends too many messages or who sends low quality messages.

Aspects of the message itself also cause respondents to delete pass-along emails without opening them. For example, if the receiver recognizes the subject line and has received the message before (the number one reason for deleting emails was old content) or if the receiver sees Fwd: Fwd: Fwd: in the subject line, he may delete the message. Emails containing attachments drove deletions for two reasons: respondents suspected they carried viruses and respondents anticipated long download times. Nobody likes unrequested emails with attachments. Not even NASA!

“Please allow 10-15 business days for processing. For email inquiries, be sure to include a subject and do not include any attachments. “

They’ve conquered space and sent a man to the Moon but can’t handle our stupid attachments of puppies and rainbows. Nobody wants to deal with attachments. Just like nobody wants to deal with gonorrhea.

Test results and conclusions

• The average pass-along email contained three generations and included the email addresses of 26 individuals throughout the message;
• The first type of pass-along email mentioned was jokes. Jokes seem to be the type that people receive most frequently, and the type that they are most apt to pass along;
• Women were 3 times more likely to receive chain letters than were men;
• Women were significantly more likely to receive games than were their male counterparts;
• Women were significantly more likely than were men to pass these messages along to others;
• Almost 23% of pass-along emails received, contained some type of attachment. Jpg files and .gif files were most common, representing almost 70% of the attachments participants received;
• Viral Mavens sent more than two and a half times as many messages as did Infrequent Senders;
• Viral Mavens were 50% more likely to forward a pass-along email that they received than were Infrequent Senders;
• People reported having been somewhat more cautious when opening emails and attachments in the aftermath of major virus attacks. This timidity, however, did not seem long lived. Email behavior was back to normal relatively soon;
• Both Viral Mavens and Infrequent Senders took action in real life as a result of receiving pass-along emails;
• Messages that spark strong emotion – either humor, fear, sadness, or inspiration – seem to be those messages that are most likely to be forwarded;
• Viral Mavens were more likely to feel a sense of social obligation and responsibility to forward messages along;
• Viral Mavens view forwarding messages as important to remaining “in the loop” and to maintaining relationships with those who send messages to them;
• Infrequent Senders are more likely to forward messages to one person at a time and follow pass-along email etiquette more stringently;
• Infrequent Senders add personalized notes to messages to motivate recipients to read the message;
• Participants did communicate much irritation at the unsolicited emails that they receive from companies. Emails that originate directly from a company and not from a known individual are viewed as spam;
• Individuals said that they did not consider information about a company junk if it came from a person that they know. They would assume that the product is of value, and that the individual passed on the information for a good reason;
• Thus, it is critical that companies carefully identify viral consumers and opinion leaders that are truly interested in the information, sending messages to as few as necessary so that the number of people who receive email direct from the company is minimized.

Some tips for good email marketing strategies

• Place the consumer at the center. Consumers will share with one another;
• Match messages to the consumer motivational bases for participating in pass-along email – appeal to their desire for fun, entertainment, escape, and, importantly, to maintain connections with others;
• Take advantage of the cultural “sweet spots” like the freedom of the open field, the close-knit community of familiar others, seizing executive privileges, and so on;
• Don’t neglect the Infrequent Senders who, nonetheless, send a high portion of the pass-along emails that they receive. Seek out this group, as they may wield a bigger impact than Viral Mavens because their sending of messages is more targeted and personalized;
• Consider crafting messages that are consistent with those strains that were identified as particularly viral – jokes about work, computers, games;
• Avoid recycling old content. The number one reason for deleting emails is old content;
• Don’t worry about the effects of viruses like the Love Bug virus on pass-along email. Although email volume dropped right after the infection, consumers seem resilient;
• Wondering how much control you’ll have over mutations in your message? Your subject line has a good chance of being retained throughout the pass-along email chain. Make sure it’s a good one!

Why do consumers pay attention to word of mouth? According to Schiffman & Kanuk in Consumer Behavior , the most basic motive for a consumer’s attention to word of mouth messages is the expectation of receiving information that may decrease decision time and effort. A second motive for using word of mouth concerns the consumer’s desire to decrease dissonant cognitions and increase cognitive consistency. Consumers want to reinforce their decisions or to increase their confidence in the views that they already have.

The development of the Internet has led to the appearance of new forms of word of mouth communication. Consumers can now easily publish their opinions and viewpoints on products and services to the public at large.

Online word of mouth has a series of advantages, disadvantages and key features that need to be taken into account.

The Internet provides consumers with a large and diverse set of opinions about products and services from individuals with whom they have little or no prior relationship. According to Granitz and Ward in Virtual community: A sociocognitive analysis the difference between traditional and online word of mouth is the lack of constrain by circumstances of background, appearance, status and workplace in the participants identity. Thus a key difference between traditional and online word of mouth is the strength of the ties between the consumers who interact. In The strength of weak ties, Mark Granovetter suggests that the strength of a tie between two individuals is a function of the amount of time spent together, the emotional intensity and degree of intimacy in the relationship. Weak ties are particularly important in serving as bridges across cliques of strong ties.

But these weak ties present some difficulties for the consumer because they make it hard to assess the quality of the message, the intention of the informant and his expertise on the topic. For example, in Online Consumer Psychology: Understanding and Influencing Consumer Behavior in the Virtual World the authors mention a case where students have been hired to post questions and comments on teen-oriented chat rooms and bulletin boards generating discussion and interest in pop singer Christina Aguilera.

Consumers tend to evaluate a message on the basis of the content itself. For example, the presence of negative information along with positive information has been found to increase message credibility. Negative information is given more weight by consumers. Given the relative anonymity of communication on the Internet, people may tend to act in a freer, less constrained manner in this environment. This anonymity might have the effect of increasing the amount of negative word of mouth.

In addition to using the content of a published message to evaluate the message, consumers are also likely to use information about the source, or writer, of the message. The perception that the source of a message is similar to the reader can lead to a greater persuasive effect. Cues that give a source the appearance of expertise, such as credentials and past achievements, are also capable of increasing a message’s persuasive effect.

In the Published word of mouth chapter from Online Consumer Psychology: Understanding and Influencing Consumer Behavior in the Virtual World one can find a very interesting study.

Nineteen frequent online shoppers( 8 males and 11 females), age 15 to 56 undertook the test. More than half spend at least 7 hours a week online and the most common uses of the Internet included obtaining news, checking email, information search for school or work, checking financial information, and shopping. Approximately half of the subjects reported that they never participated in chats/forums or played games online. For their participation, informants received a $10 gift certificate from Amazon.com.

All but one of the 19 subjects had experiences using word of mouth. The most frequent word of mouth was consumer reviews. Most of the informants used reviews that were provided by the retail site on which they were shopping. Unless the purchase was very important or involving, informants were not likely to seek out reviews at other independent sites.

Study conclusions:

Overall consumers agreed that online information search was more efficient than other forms of information search and that Internet word of mouth information affected the content of their consideration sets (a set of alternatives that will be further considered). Online consumer information could lead to additions to a consideration set. It could also lead to items being removed from the informant’s consideration sets.

Consumers with information motives often rely on consumer reviews. Such reviews are typically more specific in focus than other types of Internet word of mouth. Consumers with support and community motives rely on discussion forums and particularly seem to value dialog. Participants in these forums exchange stories about their product experiences, helping others deal with common problems and building a community among product owners, users, or enthusiasts.

Consumers rely on Internet word of mouth when input from friends and family (or other strong-tie sources) is not available (for example, traveling to a faraway place). They were more likely to mention using online word of mouth for products or services that were new or infrequently purchased. Word of mouth was also used when purchasing gifts because in this situation, the person likely to be the best source of word of mouth – the gift recipient – is unavailable.

The test subjects identified two types of problems: untrustworthy or biased information (consumers questioned the credibility of the postings simply because they were found on a manufacturer’s Web site) and poor message quality with little or no valid information.

One of the most commonly mentioned aspects of a consumer posting that appeared to serve as a cue for its validity, or usefulness, was the presence of specific details in the posting (if a comment involves “I” statements or otherwise evokes real personal experience, then its credibility is enhanced). A second aspect of consumer comments that served as a cue for validity was the presence of some degree of consensus among reviewers. It appeared that consumer opinions were used to validate other consumer opinions. Information about the identity of the consumer who posted some information was also used as a cue for the validity of that information.

Another type of validity cue that our informants reported involves the wording used in the posted comment (inexpressive slang or extreme emotion words) because online comments are written rather than spoken and can be examined more carefully. For example, iF yOu ArE liKe loOkiNg aT s0Me qUaNtUm phYsiCs bO0Ks aNd yoU lIke sTuMbLe uP0n sOmE reVieWs wRiTteN liKe thIs, thEre’S a g00d cHanCe y0u wiLl diSreGaRd tHem. xoxo

A number of people mentioned that they read online word of mouth for fun. On Amazon.com you can find a lot of ironic and humorous reviews for things like the wolf shirt or the swallow shirt.

“This item has wolves on it which makes it intrinsically sweet and worth 5 stars by itself, but once I tried it on, that’s when the magic happened. [...] I walked from my trailer to Wal-mart with the shirt on and was immediately approached by women. The women knew from the wolves on my shirt that I, like a wolf, am a mysterious loner who knows how to ‘howl at the moon’ from time to time (if you catch my drift!). The women that approached me wanted to know if I would be their boyfriend and/or give them money for something they called mehth. I told them no, because they didn’t have enough teeth, and frankly a man with a wolf-shirt shouldn’t settle for the first thing that comes to him. I arrived at Wal-mart, mounted my courtesy-scooter (walking is such a drag!) sitting side saddle so that my wolves would show. While I was browsing tube socks, I could hear aroused asthmatic breathing behind me. I turned around to see a slightly sweaty dream in sweatpants and flip-flops standing there. She told me she liked the wolves on my shirt, I told her I wanted to howl at her moon. She offered me a swig from her mountain dew, and I drove my scooter, with her shuffling along side out the door and into the rest of our lives. Thank you wolf shirt.”

An interesting possible downside of the ability of online consumer information to make a buyer aware of new relevant features is that this information could also have the capacity to impair post-purchase satisfaction. For example, one informant appeared unsure of the value of having learned about a possible problem with a new car that he had recently purchased:

“I finally figured out what they meant by the clunk in the steering wheel and I wrote back “it’s such a tiny thing. If you hadn’t made me so paranoid I never would have noticed it.”"

Word of mouth Tips

• Create amazing products and provide excellent service.
• Earn the respect of your customers. Fulfill their needs. Stay honest.
• Give people a reason to talk about you (new features, interesting package, a special sale).
• Find a simple topic that is easy to repeat. What can people tell a friend about you in one sentence?
• Make it easier for the conversation to take place (allow people to post reviews, use tell-a-friend forms on your web site).
• Do you like to talk about boring products, boring companies and boring ads? Exactly! Everything has an interesting side. Find yours!
• Talk to them. When people are talking about you, answer them. Reply to their email. Comment on blogs that write about you. Send thank-you notes.
• Make them feel like they are part of the family(think about Harley owners, sports fans and Apple users).
• Keep in mind the consumer concerns regarding untrustworthy or biased information. Promise to publish  every received comment that avoids obscene language and content offensive to any particular person or social group.
• Try to maintain some control of message content while at the same time showing a willingness to publish both positive and negative information.

Online Consumer Psychology: Understanding and Influencing Consumer Behavior in the Virtual World by Curtis P. Haugtvedt, Karen A. Machleit and Richard Yalch contains edited versions of papers that were presented at the 2001 Advertising and Consumer Psychology Conference in Seattle, Washington. Published in 2005 the 576 page book has 23 chapters structured in 6 parts: Community, Advertising, Customization, Site Design, Decision Making and Research Tools and Approaches.

The good

- Almost every chapter presents at least one study. Sometimes the results in the experiment are the same with the theoretical ideas but there are cases in which the results of the study don’t match the idea in the theory.
- Not the “Make a fortune in 10 easy steps by manipulating people into buying your crap” kind of book. It has a very academic approach.
- You can find a tone of reference to other useful books in it.
- Chapter 15, The Effect of Site Design and Interattribute Correlations on Interactive Web-Based Decisions has a web based choice study that is available online here. It’s a good thing to actually see how the experiments were conducted.
- Although the book is quite old it did not leave the feeling of being obsolete. It has a lot of good info.

The bad

- The book’s content is primarily from 2001. When we consider the rapid changes in the online world this would chronologically place it right before the dinosaurs went belly up.
- 576 pages. I think they could have made it 350 pages without loosing any meaningful content. Useful tip: if you can’t make it trough this review you probably won’t make it trough the almost 600 pages.
- Some of the websites mentioned no longer exist. Considering this book was published in 2005 this is further proof of the rapid changes that occur online and the need to frequently update this kind of material.
- Vodaphone? Bauarian Motor Works? Ewww!
- Looks like those dinosaurs didn’t have blogs or social networking websites like Facebook because there is no mention about them or how they influence consumers.

Each chapter is written by different authors. 56 names appear on the 23 chapters making for an interesting reading experience.

Part I, Community analyzes the influence of online communities such as bulletin boards and chat rooms on consumer behavior, online word of mouth and pass along emails. If you have any experience with forums and chat rooms, chapter 1 will make for a very interesting read. Both the theory and the experimental results will feel familiar as you will start to identify the ritual behavior that separates the members from the nonmembers in your online community.

The development of the Internet has led to the appearance of new forms of word of mouth communication (more details in the Online word of mouth article). Online word of mouth is different from traditional word of mouth. A lot of interesting aspects like source credibility and the strength of weak ties are tackled in this chapter.

Next up are the pass along emails. Users are split into Viral Mavens and Infrequent Senders. The results are quite surprising as senders were viewed positive, even though the experience of receiving pass-along emails can be negative at times. The number one reason for quashing a message was the sense that the content was old. That feeling of familiarity from chapter 1 will come back as you can find a lot of patterns regarding pass along emails in your online activity.

Part II, Advertising focuses mainly on banner ads and the click-trough rate. A study analyzes the direct and indirect effects of banner ads on banner ad brands and competing brands with very interesting results for both memory and constrained choice.

Next chapter analyzes the strengths and weaknesses of the click-trough rate and some techniques that influence click-trough like banner size, animation, mentioning price/brand/”click here” in the banner, using trick banners and so on.

The Click-Through Rate Is an Immediate Effectiveness Measure That Ignores Several Stages of the Persuasion Process.(p.146)

There is also a chapter about advergaming and background ads. This is an intriguing topic because players generally agree with the statement that product placements could add to game realism. So games are one place where consumers want ads.

Part III, Customization starts off by establishing the difference between personalization and customization. The first question this part addresses is the number of attributes a consumer customizes. The second question addresses the presence of a default value.

The authors make a detailed analysis of different types of product selection protocols(assortment, personalization, and customization) as well as various mixes of these types. The protocols are analyzed in terms of their provisions, their demands, and their constraints, with interesting results.

There is also a chapter about bilingual consumers and how second language web-site processing might impact persuasion. An intriguing theory states that a second language ad could be as memorable as a first language ad if nonverbal cues(like pictures and symbols) were provided to facilitate message processing.

Part IV, Site Design, demonstrates that visual consistency in the look and feel of Web sites will affect brand attitudes of visitors to that site. Gender differences and the format that product decision sites use to present information are also examined.

Part V, Decision Making analyzes if the increased availability of information technology will allow consumers to make more rational decisions and examine how new technology affects the consumer decision making process.

The advantages and disadvantages of online and offline shopping are also examined.

There is also a chapter about online auctions and one about health care decisions. I think they could have done without these 2 chapters, especially the one about online auctions. The amount of information provided for these intricate topics is slim. I don’t think a 10 page chapter can even scratch the surface of online auctions. It just adds up to the almost 600 pages of the book. Maybe this is a case of less is more.

Part VI, Research Tools and Approaches contains a discussion of the use of the virtual experience environment as a research tool. Using the Web to create an online interactive research space is proposed as a way to provide benefits throughout the research process.

Should you spend your time and money on this book? Depends. Bloggers will be somewhat disappointed because there is no direct content for blogs. However, the information about online communities, banners, factors affecting click-trough rate, word of mouth and site design might become handy.

If you plan on opening your small online shop i think this can help you quite a lot. Almost every chapter has useful information about online shopping and the little things that turn the consumer towards your business and keep him there.