eThesis - Kauppakorkeakoulun sähköiset gradut

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This study aims to identify the main Software as a Service (SaaS) adoption criteria and apply them in permission-based email marketing campaign. Cloud computing and SaaS in precise is becoming a temping business sector for companies. While most of the attention is focus on the technological aspect, the business and marketing sides were less studied. The thesis present an empirical case study to investigate how respondents of small and medium enterprises' (SME), respond to different kind of stimulus from potential service providers, focusing on four distinctive adoption categories.

The thesis is empirical and exploratory in nature. In the beginning, cloud computing and SaaS are reviewed to form the background of the study. Afterwards, special attention is dedicated to identifying and grouping the crucial SaaS adoption factors. The Technological-Organization-Environmental (TOE) and Diffusion of Innovations (DOI) frameworks had been used in the process of grouping the adoption factors into four categories. The second part of the literature review is dedicated to permission-based email marketing, examining the positive and negative sides and following how marketing has evolved and let to the adoption of permission-based email marketing. Quantitative data was gathered from a case company which is about to release new SaaS product and which wanted to study the perception of its potential clients towards the four SaaS adoption categories.

The findings of the empirical part of this study are separated in four parts. Each part is dedicated to one of the four distinct adoption categories: Usability, Complexity, Security and Price. Usability and Complexity were the best perceived adoption categories while Security and Price didn't attract as much attention as initially anticipated. As a conclusion the study managed to shed some insight about how the SaaS adoption categories are perceived from SME's. The results can't be classified as expected or as absolutely innovative, since two of the categories behaved as it was expected while the other two - Complexity and Security showed some surprising results.