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Personalized email marketing in loyalty programs: The role of multidimensional construal levels

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Abstract

Loyalty programs offer unique opportunities for firms to personalize their marketing communications to consumers. However, limited attention has been paid to how consumers’ actions within a loyalty program can be leveraged to design effective personalized messages. Addressing this gap, the current research investigates how tier level and goal distance in hierarchical loyalty programs can dictate varying responses to cognitive vs. affective message designs. Through two lab experiments and one field study involving real email campaigns from an international frequent flyer program, we show that the two components work jointly through a Boolean-like mechanism to determine a consumer’s mental construal level. A lower construal level results from simultaneous low tier and distance, which leads to a more favorable response to affective message appeals. In comparison, when either or both of tier level and goal distance are of high magnitude, the resulting higher construal level favors more cognitive message appeals.

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Notes

  1. Although we consider goal distance as a horizontal distance and tier as a vertical distance based on typical human psychology, it is important to note that these labels do not fundamentally change the reasoning and predictions in our research. Rather, they serve as convenient references to the two distances.

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  1. Department of Marketing, Montclair State University, Montclair, NJ, 07043, USA

    Junzhou Zhang

  2. Department of Marketing, Old Dominion University, Norfolk, VA, 23529, USA

    Yuping Liu-Thompkins

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Zhang, J., Liu-Thompkins, Y. Personalized email marketing in loyalty programs: The role of multidimensional construal levels. J. of the Acad. Mark. Sci. 52, 196–216 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11747-023-00927-5

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