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Viral email marketing describes what happens 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, and so on. When used responsibly, it can be a powerful community-building, brand-building and list-building tool. Gone wrong, viral marketing can result in legitimate campaigns being perceived as spam. Here are some tips to get the best results:
- Make sure a forward message is appropriate.
The first step is to consider whether you should even mention forwarding at all! Some campaigns are designed for communicating private information to a specific group of people and are just not suitable for sharing.
- Know your campaign objective.
Forwarding can build brand awareness, increase your subscriber base, or sell more goods. If any of these is your primary goal, make your forward message strong and visible.
- Remind readers to forward appropriately.
Recipients who forward may not consider that someone else might not want to receive the email. If they send it anyway, the receiver will be annoyed, and it will reflect poorly on you.
- Be careful when offering rewards for forwarding.
While incentives can be highly rewarding, it may encourage inappropriate forwarding. If this happens, the backlash could affect your current subscribers and potential new subscribers. YIKES! As with any marketing campaign, it's a good idea to test your incentive on a small group of people first.
- Think about what you want new recipients to do.
Think back to your campaign objective. Forwarding alone helps increase awareness, but if you want new subscribers or more sales, make sure there's a call-to-action for new readers. Include a link to your sign-up page or online store.
- Think about how you want new recipients to feel.
Read your own email as though you had received it from a friend. Does it make sense? Make sure your message addresses the needs of new recipients, not just the people on your original list.
- Remember your brand.
Always include your company name, logo and Web site address in every email that you send. You know who you are, but new readers might not.
- Use email marketing software that measures your success.
When you use HTML, you can embed a "forward" link in your campaign that measures how many people forwarded your email (and how often), the number of additional click-throughs gained by forwarding, and new subscribers. Measuring success is a critical part of email marketing, and forwarding success is no exception.
- Readers need to use the forward link in your email message.
Measuring viral activity is only possible if your readers click on the forward link you embed in your email message. If they use the forward button on their email client, all tracking ability is lost. Old habits die hard, so you'll need to make your forward link obvious and your call-to-forward clear.
- Craft your call-to-forward carefully.
If you want people to click on your forward link instead of their forward button, say more than just "Forward to a Friend." Spell it out for readers with words like "Click here to send this email to others you think would enjoy it."
- Vary your link.
If you send regular email, text that appears in the same place each time can become "invisible" to the reader. Move your link around or use a bigger font or different color for a while to get your link noticed.
I've learned that if you follow the above guidelines, you'll increase the chance that your email will be forwarded and decrease the chance that it will be perceived as spam.
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