Viral Marketing Defined

The term viral marketing was originally penned in a newsletter by venture capitalist Steve Jurvetson, who defined it as "network-enhanced word of mouth." While the word "viral" may have negative connotations ("the flu" and "corrupted hard drive" come to mind), the concept of viral marketing is a positive one. Marketers have long believed that people who hear about a product or service from a friend are more likely to buy, and buy more quickly and easily than those who heard about it in other ways. In fact, many articles on viral marketing make reference to a classic 1970's Faberge TV commercial with sudsy-headed women who told two friends, and then "they told two friends, and so on and so on and so on."

While that commercial is probably the easiest way to illustrate the concept of viral marketing, it's not the most helpful example because: (1) most of us can't afford to produce a TV commercial, and (2) now, with the Internet, and email in particular, you can tell more people about something faster than good-old-fashioned word of mouth.

Email: The Ideal Viral Marketing Tool
Email is an extremely fast and cost-effective viral marketing tool, especially for small business owners with little or no marketing budget. In today's wired world, an email sent to a contact list of only 20 people could potentially end up in the inboxes of hundreds, thousands, or even millions of "friends" around the globe. When an email campaign travels beyond its original contact list, as recipients forward it to their friends, who forward it to their friends, and so on, we refer to it as "viral email marketing." Email forwarding can lead to all sorts of added business benefits, all at no extra cost to you, but the viral component of your email campaign should ultimately support a higher-level objective. Here are some campaign objectives that can be supported by viral email marketing:

• Increasing brand exposure: Sometimes all you want to do is get noticed, to 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 go farther.
  
• Growing your opt-in list: Get your readers to forward your email, and as long as it has a sign-up offer, you can encourage new signups-and even match those signups to the readers who did the original forwarding. See the next bullet for more on this.
  
• Designing loyalty programs: If you knew who was forwarding your emails the most, and that those forwards were turning into 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 get 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. Forwarding can only help you, but if you don't ask, people often don't even 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 forwarding to revenues. The math is simple: the more your email is forwarded, the more likely you are to increase revenues beyond the original list's potential.
  
• Generating revenue, from advertising: If people forward your email that contains an ad, more people see or click on the ad. You could be getting far more ad views and ad clicks than you ever imagined, and these can translate directly into revenue. For example, in a recent viral email marketing campaign, the original email list generated 492 clicks, but after all the forwarding was done, there were 1,099 clicks-over twice as many clicks!