Bulk email is often used in organizations to communicate ``important-to-organization'' messages such as policy changes, organizational plans, and administrative updates. However, normal employees may prefer messages more relevant to their jobs or interests. Organizations face the challenge of balancing prioritizing the messages they prefer employees to know (tactical goals) while maintaining employees' positive experiences with these bulk emails, then they continue to read these emails in the future (strategic goals). Could personalization help organizations achieve these tactical and strategic goals? In an 8-week field experiment with a university newsletter, we implemented a 4x5x5 factorial design on personalizing subject lines, top news, and message order based on both the employees' and the organization's preferences. We measured these designs' influences on the open/interest/recognition/read-in-detail rate of the whole newsletter and the single messages within it. We found that ``important-to-organization'' messages only got higher recognition rates when being put on subject lines / top news (tactical goal). Mixing them with employee-preferred messages in top news did not bring further improvement to their own recognition rates but could improve the whole newsletter's recognition rate. Only when the top news solely contained the employee-preferred messages were the employees slightly more interested in the newsletter (strategic goal). We further analyze on which topics the employees and the organization's preferences conflicted. Finally, we discuss the design suggestions on personalization and recommendation for organizational bulk email.
翻译:组织经常使用散装电子邮件来传达“重要到组织”的信息,例如政策变化、组织计划和行政更新等。然而,正常雇员可能更喜欢与其工作或利益更相关的信息。组织面临的挑战是平衡他们更希望雇员了解的信息的优先次序(战术目标),同时保持雇员对这些大宗电子邮件的积极经验,然后在将来继续阅读这些电子邮件(战略目标)。个人化能帮助组织实现这些战术和战略目标吗?在为期8周的大学通讯实地实验中,我们根据雇员和组织的偏好,在个人化主题行、顶级新闻和电文顺序方面实施了4x5x5要素设计。我们衡量这些设计对雇员更愿意了解的信息的开放/兴趣/认可/阅读率以及整个通讯中的单一信息。我们发现,“重要到组织”的信息只有在被放在主题行/最高新闻杂志上时才能得到更高的认可率(策略目标 ) 把它们与高级新闻中提及的信息混为一谈,高级新闻中的雇员信息并没有使自己的承认率得到进一步的改进,而我们只是对最终的雇员建议进行了最新的分析。