Congratulations, You WON!!! Exploring trends in Big Data marketing communication

Big Data collection and analysis is exploding throughout every field of research. Now that many forms of communication have gone electronic, the possibility to research them is greater than it has ever been. With this data there is also the possibility to correlate linguistic data with metadata to uncover interesting patterns. Big Data research in linguistics is therefore not constrained to just word counts, but depends on the discipline and goals of the study. Linguistic analyses of corpora can have benefits outside the field of linguistics, such as in marketing, where there is a substantial economic value placed on language. Linguistic descriptions of marketing data therefore have a commercial appeal since they can be applied directly to the creation of future texts. This paper researches a corpus of 2,021 email marketing subject lines (9,881 tokens), which were together sent over 84 million times. The subject lines are coupled in the analysis with each email’s average open rates, which is a standard success metric widely used by email marketers in evaluating subject lines. The analysis shows how email marketing subject lines are similar to other types of CMC and other types of marketing. The subject lines exhibit interesting linguistic features, especially in the use of non-standard variations and exclamation points. These variations, as well as the parts of speech of the subject lines, are investigated to show which of them correlate to the success of each subject line. This research also addresses the gap in CMC research on email marketing and email subject lines, both of which have been almost entirely ignored in linguistic research.