Because this research is looking for main effects, it makes use of quantitative data. This gives the research the main effects and not the underlying reasons or needs.
This research has a two by three experiment design. The independent variables are the motivations (promoting health motivation, promoting financial motivation and promoting social motivation) and the activations (by an email with text or an email with video). Also, the activations are independent variables in the conceptual model. Lastly, gender is expected to have a moderating effect when it comes to promoting social motivation. The dependent variable is a) the amount of tracked activities in the Health app app and b) the tracked energy expenditure in the Health app app.
3.1 Population
For this quantitative field study, all the new users who are started using the Health app app between October 24th and November 21th are selected. This group is excluded from other emailing campaigns. Otherwise this group receives different emails that motivate and activate them, which would interfere with this research. The new users receive the email with the activation and the motivation on Wednesday November 21th or Thursday November 22th.
Because of problems with the server, this research is forced to make use of two batches. The first batch of 1533 people will be sent on Wednesday. The participants in this batch are started using the Health app app between October 24th and November 14th. The second batch of 433 people will be sent on Thursday. The participants in this batch are started using the Health app app between November 15th and November 21th. Thereby, participants younger than 18 years old, users who passed away and users without an email address are excluded. Participants who have unsubscribed from emails are logically excluded too.
In total, this research makes use of 2089 participants. 5% do not receive an email, because this is the control group. The other 1985 participants are randomly assigned to one of the six groups.
So, every group has 330 or 331 members.
The six groups are shown in the table on the next page.
Table 2: Experiment groups
So,
- group 0 is the control group
- group 1 is activated by a text email and motivated by the health motivation, - group 2 is activated by a text email and motivated by the financial motivation, - group 3 is activated by a text email and motivated by the social motivation, - group 4 is activated by a video email and motivated by the health motivation, - group 5 is activated by a video email and motivated by the financial motivation and - group 6 is activated by a video email and motivated by the social motivation.
As said, a control group of 5% is used. This control group is used to compare the control group with the other groups and to ensure the effect occurs because of the different motivations and activations. The control group consists of 104 participants.
For group three and six this research creates a challenge in the Health app app. The name of the challenge is ‘Kom in Beweging’. This challenge starts at the day of emailing. To make sure that the challenge is as accessible as possible, in the challenge energy expenditure is the measure in the ranking and all the automatic tracked activities count. The duration of the challenge in the app is four weeks, but the activities of the users are followed two and a half weeks after sending the email. This is determined because of the effect of an email which, according to Van Diepen, Donkers and Franses (2009) is the biggest in the first two weeks, and because of the time wherein this research should be done.
To ensure the internal validity, all the emailing groups receive almost the same personalized email at the same time. All the emails are professionally designed by Doornvogel. This company designs and provides the layout for all the emails of Healthcare insurance company.
The Healthcare insurance company’ corporate identity layout, text introductions and the subject lines of all the emails are the same. Only the activation and motivation differ. This is a video with a short introduction text or only text with the different motivations. The videos are
embedded in the email as a GIF file. This is done
because of the options GIFs offer. A GIF is with less than 1 mb relatively small, it is basic, it opens and starts directly when the email is opened, it can be posted in a loop and it has almost no waiting or loading time. So, embedding a GIF in an email is easy to use and to open. A disadvantage is that adding audio is impossible. But this is an advantage too, because of the high open rates of Healthcare insurance company on mobile devices. It is not desirable that an email makes noise when it opens on a mobile phone. The different emails are added in the appendix.
After sending the emails, the activities of the users are followed. The activity is measured by the amount of tracked activities and the amount of tracked energy expenditure in de Health app app in the two and a half weeks after sending the email with one of the motivations and activations.
The personal characteristics that are available for the analysis of all the users are UserID, motivation method, date of subscribing and the batch. More information is available for some users. These users are insured with Healthcare insurance company. Of this group the date of birth, gender, stage of life group, mentality profile, vitality profile and province are available.
The total output file is presented in the appendix.
No information about the participants is available to the researcher that could lead to identifying participants with respect to personal information (e.g. name, email, address).
3.2 Analysis
This research makes use of the analyzing software Microsoft Excel and SPSS. To discover the differences between groups, this research starts with exploring the complete data set. During this analysis, the outliers will be identified and deleted. The missing and incorrect values will be identified too. Subsequently the distribution will be determined, which determines the analysis method. If the data are normally distributed, this research makes use of an ANOVA test, ANCOVA test, regression analysis and chi-squared test. If the data are not normally distributed, this research makes use of a Kruskal Wallis analysis, Mann-Whitney U test, a regression analysis and chi-squared test.