First you need to identify what types of offers and messages can be successful
with a viral marketing effort. What is the least expensive, most cost efficient, and the quickest, most desirable
way to get the word out about a business? Word of mouth or referrals, right?
This is where your customers, leads, and others who are familiar with your offering
become your biggest advocates so much so that they can’t help but recommend
you to their friends, family, and/or associates. The hope is that a percentage
of those friends, pass on even more recommendations.
The word will spread farther from there as customers become allies, not to mention
friends, partners, and even compatriots.
E-mail is the perfect venue to grow such a chain of events due to its ease-ofuse
and interactive nature. Look at what happens when someone sends you a great
joke via e-mail. What do you typically do? Chances are, if it’s good enough for a real belly laugh (and not just a chuckle), you forward it on to others who, in your estimation,
would appreciate the humor. It’s as easy as 1-2-3 click Forward. Type in
the names of your recipients. Click Send. Before e-mail, what on earth did we do?
This type of easy “pass along” presents a fantastic opportunity for advertisers
who have a message or an offer that is truly extraordinary. Therein lies the
challenge: Make it unique. Make it fun, even. If the offer is right and if your original
recipients are the right audience for it, then you stand a good chance of
achieving marketing bliss.
HOW MANY EYEBALLS?
One reason this method of marketing is often called viral, or organic, marketing
is because of the rate at which a campaign such as this can grow. Think of
how a single-celled organism can grow. One cell splits into two. The two cells
each split into two more. The four split again. Before you know it, what started out
as a single cell has become 3,400.
The same concept applies with a viral e-mail campaign. You send off a stellar
promotion to your customer file, or to a brand-new targeted acquisitions list. A
percentage of those people will pass that e-mail along to others. Those recipients
will then forward it on again. It simply mushrooms from there.
Unfortunately, however, this rarely occurs by itself. There are a few things
that you need to do to help ensure that it does happen.
VIRAL COMPONENTS
First you need to identify what types of offers and messages can be successful
with a viral marketing effort. Not all businesses will get dynamic results either
because viral marketing doesn’t fit their business model or because their offerings
aren’t compelling enough to spur viral action.
That is one of the keys to success when it comes to viral marketing. The message
and/or offer has to be so unique and interesting that recipients are bound to
pass it on. Here are a few examples.
• New Line Cinema created a series of ghoulish (but humorously so) postcards
to promote its spooky Final Destination film’s Web site. Recipients would receive these animated postcards,
which showcased various methods of demise, in their e-mail inboxes. They
could then go back to the site and create their own postcards to send to
friends and family. The e-mails themselves were creative and highly entertaining.
And New Line’s goal was accomplished brilliantly much of
the film’s ticket sales was attributed to this viral campaign. The movie
business is a natural business for this type of offering, which we’ll see in
the next example as well.
• Double Parked was an independent film released by a small producer,
Fierce Films. Prior to the movie’s release, Fierce Films issued a viral email
campaign to just 150 people. Within three days, the e-mail was forwarded
7,000 times. That’s right 7,000. How? It was quite simple, really.
(For the record, some of the more successful viral campaigns are based on
the simplest of setups and principles.) The e-mail read like a summons,
wherein the recipients were accused of such mock violations as “works too
hard,” “fashion crime,” and “chronically late.” They were then directed to
a site where they could create their own fun summons to pass onto their
own family and friends. Once they completed them, they were brought to
FierceFilms.com, where they viewed the movie’s trailer and received more
information about the film and cast.
• An Australian-based company by the name of Wotch.com built an opt-in
database in the hundreds of thousands with a viral campaign. This company
produces small desktop gizmos that are essentially mini-Web browsers
in a variety of fun formats. Best of all, they were free and didn’t take up
much disk space and were fairly easy to forward. Wotch.com made money from ad space within the browsers themselves. Due to the nature of the attached
product that was e-mailed (a combination of toy and desktop tool),
the pass along rate was enough to grow the list in just a few short months.
TYPES OF MESSAGE
You can see, based on these examples, how response rates can grow exponentially
when a viral campaign is successful. What are some other ways to create
enough of a stir as to encourage this “Hey! Take a look at this!” type of
forwarding? Let’s take a look.
• Contest entries. Hypothetical scenario: You receive an advertising e-mail
that promotes an offer with a sweepstakes. The contest has as its prize
something that you desire, so you enter. Here’s the kicker: If you pass the
e-mail along, or if you sign up a few friends on the advertiser’s site, you’ll
receive x number of additional entries to that beloved sweepstakes with the
prize you hold so dear. You get the idea. A sweepstakes can be a popular
way to promote your services through e-mail, viral component or not. But
add a message to induce pass along and a sweepstakes can definitely encourage
this kind of growth.
• Deep discounts. In a retail environment, sales and discounts can play a
heavy hand in your revenues. With this type of model, you could send out
a message with a certain percent discount across select sale items. And if
your recipient customers sign up or forward the message on to others, they
will receive an extra percentage off for every new sign-up.
• Attachables. Like Wotch.com and others whose business models are built,
at least in part, on advertising revenue, sending a branded executable file can
create a viral reaction simply due to the attachment’s uniqueness. Office.
com once sent a desktop basketball game that could be forwarded. The
game was a fun diversion from the everyday workweek and encouraged
pass along left and right. And smart thinking on Office.com’s part the
desktop game carried the Office.com logo. Just be wary of sending attachments.
Many people are not inclined to open them due to the “real” viruses
that shut down computers. |
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