Adoption and Effectiveness of AI-Personalized Email Marketing: A Cross-Industry Study of Indian Organizations

This Doctor of Business Administration (DBA) dissertation was submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the award of the Doctorate of Business Administration at ESGCI – École Supérieure de Gestion et de Commerce International, Paris, France.Artificial intelligence (AI) is increasingly transforming email marketing through personalization, predictive analytics, automation, and data-driven decision-making. This study examines the adoption and effectiveness of AI-personalized email marketing across Indian organizations, with particular attention to perceived marketing effectiveness, KPI-oriented outcomes, organizational readiness, internal AI governance, and external regulatory pressure.A quantitative, deductive, cross-sectional survey design was used. Data were collected from 230 respondents across multiple industries in India, with 181 respondents meeting the eligibility criteria for the main hypothesis testing. The study employed five-point Likert-scale measures and used reliability analysis, exploratory factor analysis, and regression models with HC3 robust standard errors.The findings show that AI adoption has a significant positive relationship with perceived marketing effectiveness, indicating that organizations using AI more actively tend to report stronger improvements in engagement, click-through rates, conversions, retention, return on investment, and overall marketing performance. However, AI adoption did not show a significant relationship with KPI-oriented self-reported effectiveness. Organizational readiness, internal AI governance, and external regulatory pressure did not significantly moderate the relationship between AI adoption and the two effectiveness measures.The study highlights an important gap between perceived marketing benefits and measurable KPI-based outcomes. It contributes to the growing literature on AI-enabled marketing by providing cross-industry evidence from India and by examining organizational and governance-related factors alongside AI adoption. The findings suggest that while AI adoption is associated with stronger perceived marketing performance, organizations should strengthen measurement frameworks, data quality, integration, and governance to better connect AI use with verifiable business outcomes.Keywords: Artificial Intelligence, Email Marketing, Personalization, Marketing Effectiveness, Organizational Readiness, AI Governance, Digital Marketing, India.