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Introduction
There seems to be a paradox related to e-mail marketing. On the one hand, e-mail is currently a very popular and profitable communication channel. According to the Direct Marketing Association’s 2012 Response Rate Report, return on investment of e-mail was US$28.50 in sales per dollar spent, compared to US$7 of direct mail, making e-mail the most cost-effective direct marketing channel (Schiff, 2012). It is 40 times better at acquiring new customers than Facebook and Twitter combined (Aufreiter et al., 2014), and its growth rate is estimated to be 10 per cent annually up to year 2016 (VanBoskirk, 2011), suggesting that marketers will not abandon the channel within the next few years either. At the same time, intrusive unsolicited commercial e-mail (spam) has decreased the acceptance (Heinonen and Strandvik, 2007) and performance of e-mail marketing (FEDMA, 2010), filtering software block also desired e-mails (Pavlov et al., 2008) and it is predicted that a new communication channel will replace e-mail by 2020 (Brandon, 2015).
To be able to understand the viability of e-mail marketing, it is important to study under which circumstances e-mail marketing has potential to survive and which characteristics of e-mail marketing support its existence for the time being and in the future. Instead of the persuasion skills (Cheung, 2011; Dufrene et al., 2005; Sigurdsson et al., 2013), technical capabilities (Ansari and Mela, 2003, Bonfrer and Dreze, 2009) or creative solutions of marketers (Lewis et al., 2013; Cases et al., 2006; Ellis-Chadwick and Doherty, 2012), the perspective in this paper is the recipient end of the communication. The core theme of the paper is the idea of using consumer empowerment as a lens for understanding e-mail marketing. The paper assumes that if e-mail marketing supports consumer empowerment, it has better opportunities to succeed also in the future. A systematic literature review is used as a method to examine how the concept “empowerment” has been used in relation to e-mail marketing in the previous research. The purpose is to clarify why, when and how e-mail marketing can be used to empower consumers. By doing so, the paper aims to provide directions for future research.
The remainder of this paper is organized as follows. The following section briefly discusses the...