The term “viral marketing” gets a lot of play, but many people know of the term without really knowing what it means. So let’s clear up the confusion with a clear definition: viral marketing is any type of a marketing campaign that encourages recipients of the campaign’s message to *willingly* pass it along to friends, family and colleagues (as opposed to “viruses” in which the recipient unwillingly passes it along). The best correlation to viral marketing is simply “word-of-mouth.”

Because viral marketing relies on word-of-mouth, communication tools like email and instant messaging (IM) are the most powerful methods to employ a viral marketing campaign. Email and IM enable recipients to instantly pass along your marketing message to others - the very definition of viral Marketing. Viral marketing campaigns can be used to generate awareness or to stimulate specific action.

How you plan and execute your viral marketing campaign will be affected by your objective and intended target audience. For example, marketers targeting the youth market tend to create viral marketing campaigns based around “the cool factor” (like the LindsayBuddy campaign we wrote of in our Instant Messaging tip a few weeks ago). Cause-related marketers will focus on empathy and action. Let’s start by reviewing a few case studies so you can get an understanding of how viral marketing has been used.

Case Studies

The most famous case illustrating the power of viral marketing is free email provider Hotmail. In its first 18 months of operation, Hotmail signed up over 12 million users, every one of whom filled out a detailed demographic and psychographic profile in exchange for a free email account. Hotmail’s total marketing budget was only $500,000. If this seems like a lot, compare it to Juno’s $20 million that was spent to garner only one-third of the users Hotmail signed up.

How did Hotmail do it? The strategy was simple. On the bottom of each and every Hotmail email was the phrase, “Get your free private email at www.hotmail.com.” Interesting fact: today Hotmail is the largest email provider in India despite never having spent a dime in that market.

The instant messaging service, ICQ, is another viral marketing success story, though they were never even intending to market themselves. When ICQ was created in 1996, it was unlike anything else like it. People would tell other people about ICQ and would share their ICQ ID #s. Unlike HotMail, ICQ spent ZERO marketing dollars and was eventually acquired by AOL for over $287 million. At the time of its acquisition, ICQ had about 30 million users.

Free email fax service, EFax.com, used a strategy similar to Hotmail’s with similar success. In only 8 weeks, they signed up more than 300,000 subscribers - all through viral email marketing.

Execution Ideas for Viral Marketing

 

• Offer an Incentive - viral marketing is very much about the “WIIFM” principle: “what’s in it for me.” The incentive could be tangible, like a monetary incentive, or intangible like something that’s fun to look at and interact with. The key thing is to incentivize someone to tell others about you.

   

• Personalize - personalization becomes even more important with viral email marketing campaigns because response rates increase dramatically when users can see that a message is coming from a friend. It lends instant credibility to your message. It’s best when the sender’s name appears in the Sender field of the email. You can also try inserting their name in the subject line, like “Jim Doe thought you might like 35% off a new PDA.”

   

• Provide Scalability - if you’re lucky enough for your viral campaign to rocket towards success, your systems have to be ready to handle the traffic and transactional flows. Be sure you’re fully prepared for a large response before launching a viral marketing campaign.

   

• Track and analyze results - if you want to be able to measure the effectiveness of your viral marketing campaign, you may want to take steps to isolate viral marketing campaign respondents from others. For example, setting up unique URLs or even mini web sites at which only viral marketing respondents will transact.

   

• Promote Continuously - don’t run just one viral campaign. For true, lasting effectiveness, make all of your campaigns viral in some aspect, especially email.

   

Potential Pitfalls

Just like any other form of marketing, viral marketing does have unique pitfalls. Decide before you launch your campaign what your stance is on these issues:

1) Brand Dilution - viral marketing depends upon people not versed in your brand to do the “selling” for you. Carefully craft a message that is strong enough to endure misinterpretations or make your communication brandless.

2) Association with Unknown Groups - viral marketing’s strength is its potential to spread exponentially from person to person. During this process, it is possible that your message could wind up in the hands of and passed on by someone you would rather not be associated with. The only way to partially counter this is to ahead of time define and limit what information you make available for your viral marketing.

3) Avoid Making Purely Financial-Based Offers - The best viral campaigns work on the principle of value not greed. If you try to use money as an incentive there is a chance that 1) your offer will be spammed across the web and you’ll be broke and left with the nightmare of figuring out who gets what; 2) your offer will be perceived as “too good to be true” and won’t work at all.

SHARE YOUR STORY!:

Has your company conducted a successful viral marketing campaign?
Want it published in our next newsletter? If so, email the campaign concept, set-up and results to [email protected].

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