Nowadays when users navigate in internet they find lots of types of communication scattered across diverse sites. Due to the lack of users’ interests in advertisements, primarily caused by not matching their preferences, today’s advertisements have a low rate of success. Recently, owing to semantic web generation, some companies started to use personalized marketing in communication as a way to turn the conversions around and thus increase customer retention and loyalty. As a matter of fact, the retention and loyalty stages on the internet are, on average, the least crafted of the whole cycle. The customers’ conception of one-to-one marketing is quite ambiguous as they conceive that they need to be more efficient while shopping online but at the same time they feel stalked due to privacy concerns, and oversaturated with non-valuable information. The purpose of this paper is to explore from a holistic view online personalized communication strategies and how they can be implemented in order to increase customer satisfaction thus retaining customers and, in the long-term, gaining their loyalty. The main communication areas the study treats ranges from onsite the online store, where the company wants to sell the product, to offsite advertisements in websites, social media platforms and via email. In the empirical section, the study carried out a quantitative online survey to investigate customers’ perception and complete it with the literature. To answer the research questions, the study identified 19 hypotheses comprising of all primary aspects that define the exploration. The result could be gold dust for e-shop managers to help them maximize the marketing communication factor using personalization. The authors identified potential improvements to motivate customers to register in the online shop, whether communication channels are suited to implementing the strategy or not, and possible aspects to adapt in order to obtain maximal benefits. There were some limitations in terms of an analysis of the companies’ point of view and the necessity to analyze every communication channel more in depth as the study is an initial step.

Email marketing is not a new concept within marketing, it has been used by companies as a cost-effective way to incentives purchases for decades. However, during the past few years, there was a shift in the way email can be used. Today, it is also a way for companies to directly communicate with customers and through it create more long-term customer relationships. Previous research within the subject has had a focus on examining the effect of email marketing on purchases. However, with the new additional email practices, which have emerged in recent years, there is the need for studying email marketing from the perspective of the consumer. Since there are several conceptualizations of email marketing, this study adopts the definition where consumers’ consent to receiving the emails is a must, in other words permission-based email marketing. In addition, the study examines the influence of permission-based email marketing on consumers’ behaviors that go beyond purchases, namely the non-purchase behaviors. Thus, the purpose of this study is to gain a deeper understanding of how permission-based email marketing and relational factors influence consumers’ non-purchase behaviors. Moreover, the study aims to answer to the following research question: How does permission-based email marketing, aided by relational factors, influence consumers’ non-purchase behaviors? In order to answer the research question, a qualitative method was used, more specifically semi-structured interviews were conducted with young millennial consumers between the ages of 25 to 34. The results showed that different identified aspects of permission-based email marketing influence certain relational factors and ultimately the consumers’ engagement. However, a key factor is the consumer's own perception regarding what the emails from clothing retailers should contain in order to be relevant. Whether the email’s content is general or personalized, if the consumers perceive it as valuable and relevant, it will lead to increased customer satisfaction, perceived value, perceived brand competence, trust, commitment and loyalty. These relational factors can facilitate consumers’ non-purchase behaviors such as opening, reading, clicking on links and spreading positive word-of-mouth. However, the results also indicate factors, which contribute to less and more negative non-purchase behaviors. If consumers do not perceive to have given permission for receiving emails from a clothing retailer, they will respond by unsubscribing. Moreover, if consumers perceive to be receiving an excessive amount of emails, or if they deem the content irrelevant, they are more likely to delete, unsubscribe and spread negative word-of-mouth. The study resulted in a conceptual model, which illustrates the factors of both permission-based email marketing and relational factors and their influence on consumers’ non-purchase behaviors.