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Viral Marketing
How is word of mouth marketing working for you? Is there a buzz in the air about your product or service? Are you reaping benefits from the viral marketing of your customers and clients?
Viral marketing describes strategies that encourage individuals to pass your marketing message to others. This type of marketing creates the potential for exponential growth in your message's exposure and influence.
As the volume of permission email and unsolicited email increases, viral marketing becomes more important, since online buyers expand their network and come to rely more on their peers to learn about and recommend new products or services. An estimated 80% of the recipients of a viral marketing piece pass it on to at least one other individual - at no cost to you. Even better, as your message comes from a friend there is an element of implied approval that will enhance your response rate.
The branded message can be an email, a game, a movie clip, a screen saver or a news article. To be effective, viral marketing has to be tailored to its targeted audience. For one, it should exploit common interests and behaviors of the recipient and should be effortless to pass along to another party. It needs to be compelling, providing the recipient with a strong reason for passing it on to a friend or friends. In this way, a viral campaign can spread exponentially and across a broad spectrum of potential customers. Handled correctly, viral marketing can be phenomenally successful in a very short period of time.
The following is a list of campaign objectives that can be supported by viral email marketing:
- Increasing brand exposure: Sometimes all you want to do is be noticed. Start the lengthy process of getting your brand in front of as many people as possible. Encourage forwarding in your email and help your brand reach farther.
- Growing your opt-in list: Encourage your readers to forward your email. As long as it has a sign-up offer, you can encourage new signups—and match those signups to the readers who did the original forwarding.
- Designing loyalty programs: If you knew who was successfully forwarding your emails the most, producing new subscribers or sales, wouldn’t you want to thank that person and encourage them to keep it up? Viral email tracking systems can help you acknowledge or reward those special people who help you grow your business.
- Driving website traffic: If more people receive your email, more people will see and click on the link that takes them to your website—where they can be exposed to product information, cross-selling, sign-up offers, etc. If you don’t ask subscribers to forward an email, people often don’t think to pass it along. Remind them in every email.
- Generating revenue, directly from the email: If your email contains a “buy now” button, you can directly correlate to revenue increases.
- Generating revenue from advertising: If people forward an email that contains an ad, more people are exposed to it. You could be getting far more ad views and ad clicks than you expected, and these can translate directly into revenue.
The added advantage of this marketing tool is once unleashed it grows without the need for costly support staff. Programs that carry a strong viral marketing component get you much more traffic for your investment than straight advertising. Decide on your viral marketing campaign unleash it and leave the power of the user to drive the business to your door.
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