CASE STUDY

Understanding Emotional Response to Email Marketing

The Challenge

Email marketing is one of those things every brand uses, but very few understand what it actually does to their brand. Some emails feel engaging and welcome whereas others get ignored, deleted, or filed as spam.

The client wanted to understand three things at once:

  • which types of email content genuinely work,
  • which types quietly damage the brand by feeling spammy, and
  • what people already associate with the brand before receiving any new emails.

The difficulty was that people aren’t always able to explain why an email feels appealing or irritating, especially when messages seem similar.

The Solution

Rather than show static concepts, we recreated the real email environment, simulating common email apps and delivering a range of visual messages just as people would normally receive them.

Before anyone saw the emails, we ran an implicit test to capture the brand’s existing image. That gave us a baseline of how the brand was already perceived, before any new marketing came into play. Participants then viewed different email styles and formats, with implicit reaction-time testing measuring emotional engagement alongside how quickly each message triggered positive feelings or spam-like reactions.

The Outcomes

The pre-exposure testing gave us an emotional and functional profile of the brand. Existing customers described it in more emotional terms, while non-customers saw it more functionally. Across both groups, the brand lacked distinctiveness compared to competitors which is a key finding.

Looking at the emails themselves, certain formats consistently triggered positive emotional responses, feelings like familiar, cool, stylish, reliable. Others were instinctively treated as spam, even when the content was broadly similar. We were able to rank each email type by emotional engagement and pinpoint exactly what caused each approach to work.

Had the team relied on traditional feedback alone, many of these emails would have appeared equally effective. The implicit results showed that small differences in format and tone had a significant impact on how emails were emotionally received, and whether they helped the brand or not.

If you’d like to understand how this approach can be applied to your own challenge, get in touch with one of our market research experts, here.

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