摘要：Online advertising, like all advertising, attempts to provide information in order to induce a sale. Although most online advertising is done using banners on the Web, research indicates that email advertising has been rapidly expanding and is a potentially effective advertising approach. Email based advertising can take the form of a text email newsletter, sponsorships of HTML email, or even direct email. Early attempts at direct email took the form of spam rather than requested email solicitations or “opt-ins.” Although companies are still using spam, it has proven to deliver extremely poor results. If the email ad is effective, one might expect the effect of the “word-of-mouth” by forwarding on the email message to take the form of an epidemic process. This paper presents a model for email advertising as a stochastic epidemic process and a methodology to test that model and measure the effectiveness of email advertising
