Journal of Innovations in Digital Marketing

After the pandemic, the digital revolution has finally landed. Since businesses and consumers were forced to move to e-transactions, many behavioral and consumption patterns changed. The reality is that after the covid-19 crisis, most of these processes are going to stay, which means the world has made huge digital progress in just a couple of years. One of the key drivers of this digital growth has been social media usage. In the worst months of the pandemic, consumers were locked down so they turned to social media platforms to get in touch with family and friends, but also to get information and entertainment. A clear example of this explosion has been TikTok, the fastest social media platform ever to reach 1 billion users. A similar story is shared by Instagram, which was already well implemented before the pandemic (it currently accounts for more than 1.9b daily active users) but its use has been significantly higher, especially in the stories and reels formats. Statistics say that 500 million accounts use stories every day and more than 200 million businesses are on Instagram (Instagram, 2022). Yet, given the complexity of the algorithms and the changing nature of customers’ preferences businesses and brands need to design effective strategies to connect to their target audiences without being intrusive.

Email marketing has also benefited from a significant increase in the usage rate. The inability to access physical stores during the pandemic turned most businesses into e-commerce B2C or B2B models, so email was often required for communication, information sharing, order confirmations, and customer service. not surprisingly, 319.6 billion global emails were sent just in 2021, with 99% of customers checking their email accounts at least once a day (Hubspot, 2022). However, according to the (Kaspersky, 2022) report, 45.56% of e-mails sent in 2021 were spam. Consequently, consumers are still reluctant to email marketing strategies, since most of them can pose security threats. The FBI has also noticed an increase in the number of business email compromises (BEC), which is a sophisticated e-mail scam that targets both businesses and individuals who perform legitimate transfer-of-funds requests. This spam threat accounted for $43billion in losses for businesses between June 2016 and December 2021 (IC3, 2022).

Supporting marketers and managers on the best way to effectively communicate with consumers must be a priority, so we hope that the two articles in the June issue of the Journal of Innovations in Digital Marketing can provide some insightful directions.

The first article, titled “The Legal Regulation of Spam: An International Comparative Study” is written by Francisco Aranda-Serna a lawyer with interests in electronic commerce and digital compliance it tries to shed light on the legal implications of spam, and it additionally performs an interesting country comparison so international companies can set appropriate guidelines to work on European countries. The second article by López-Barceló and López, “Influencers’ Promoted Posts and Stories on Instagram: Do They Matter?” is an experimental study of the differential effects of posts, stories, and promoted posts on customers’ attitudes, purchase intentions, and engagement with brands. The authors conclude that influencers’ stories are more persuasive than posts, and, interestingly, that there is no negative effect associated with the fact that the post is promoted (advertised).

At Journal of Innovations in Digital Marketing, we want to acknowledge the reviewers who provided constructive comments and improvement suggestions to increase the value of the papers so that they can better contribute to the field. We encourage authors to submit their research to the journal with the latest theoretical and applied contributions to digital marketing. Email me if you have any questions or special topic proposals at eva.lahuerta@usal.es. Our editorial staff will make the best efforts to ensure your paper gets published in the best possible way. Visit our website for more information.