Your Clients Will Sell For You

Are you sending dozens or hundreds or thousands of emails to your customers?  That number can be duplicated and multiplied exponentially if your email is funny, controversial or outrageous.  It is called Viral Email Marketing.  And it happened to a funny email I sent to my opt-in list a few weeks ago. The click-through rate was off the chart.  Literally.  My email was forwarded to people who forwarded to other people and . . . well, you get the idea.  It’s like having your customers going out and doing the marketing for you.

Venture capitalist Steve Jurvetson is credited with coining the term “Viral email marketing’. If the term sounds distasteful to you, then call it “word-of-mouth publicity”, “media leveraging”or “creating a buzz”. The idea behind all these marketing strategies is the same, but when it comes to the internet, the term “viral email marketing” has stuck. As an interesting aside, this kind of marketing is even mentioned in the annals of Greek history, although the term viral marketing itself is fairly new!

The Concept of Viral Email Marketing

Viral email marketing is the strategy of using individuals to spread a marketing message or advertisement to other individuals, who will in turn pass it on to more individuals in their network. Viral email marketing has the potential of growing exponentially and exploding on the internet in much the same way that a viral population does in its host environment. A successful Viral email marketing campaign can deliver a marketing message to thousands, even millions of people within a very short period of time.

The concept of viral email marketing will become clearer when you consider the example of a famous and hugely successful viral email marketing campaign. Hotmail.com, a pioneer in web-based email services used this simple strategy to great effect. Initially, Hotmail gave away free email addresses to a number of customers. Hotmail then automatically attached a tag that read “Get your private, free email at http://www.hotmail.com”, at the bottom of all emails sent out by its customers.

Once this was done, Hotmail customers took care of marketing the email service to all their friends, family and associates – inadvertently of course, but it is effective marketing all the same. A prospective customer might receive an email from a friend with a Hotmail account, see the tag at the bottom, click on it to open his own account and Voila! – a new customer has just been won to Hotmail by an existing customer of Hotmail. And what’s more, the entire process is now set to repeat itself, as the new customer starts to send out emails of his own. This is a classic example of how a successful Viral email marketing strategy can spread like a ripple on a pond.

What is Viral Email Marketing? « MailService.com

To many, the term “Viral Email Marketing” might be weird, offensive or even dangerous. But when it comes to email marketing, there are some things about the much loathed virus that one can’t help but admire. …

http://www.mailservice.com/what-is-viral-email-marketing/

Publish Date: 05/22/2010 17:22

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