Viral Marketing Do’s and Dont’s
Listen, please! Stop it already with the enforced e-mail forwards! Trying to force (bribe) people to forward your info onto friends & family in order to “build your list” looks amateur in today’s ultra-permission-based world. Especially when you tell visitors nothing about their friend’s or family’s privacy in the space directly next to the e-mail form!
A true viral campaign gets forwarded because consumers appreciate the quality of the content, and not because you bribed them with a ‘freebie’ or something else.
Here’s what will not work:
Suggesting that e-mail recipients forward your message to their friends and family will not work! Adding a line at the bottom of your e-mail that reads “Please feel free to forward this message to a friend” is more likely to get it deleted than forwarded. Besides, it looks like and amateur and that’s not the image you want to convey!
Here’s what will work…
Offering something worthy of sharing, like:
- Valuable discount
- Vital information
- Additional entries into a sweepstakes
- An added discount or premium service
Relevant and timely information, research, or studies that are included in your e-mail might encourage the recipients to share with their family and friends. Interactive content like a quiz or test, especially if it’s fun, will motivate the forwarding of your emails.
Jokes and cartoons are almost always forwarded to everybody the recipient knows. Why? Because they are entertaining and entertainment is meant to be shared.
A really cool multimedia experience is always going to achieve a lot of pass-along. The novelty and tech factors of rich media alone are often enough to make the e-mail recipient eager to share it.
Oops! Almost forgot one really important thing….
You can craft a brilliant e-mail following all the rules, but if a consumer visits your site and has an experience less that what was promised, you are going to achieve viral marketing, alright…the bad kind. So be certain that your product or service is ready and is as advertised.
Anything less and you’ll not only be cheating consumers, but yourself as well.
I hope you’ve enjoyed this post, be sure to check back often for more updates. As always, we appreciate your feedback, comments and questions.
Until next time,
Godspeed
James
~+~
- Do Not Install Windows 7... Listen...Please! DO NOT install the much anticipated Windows operating system, Windows 7 RC (Release Candidate) without reading this article, first! Here is why... What you need to know before you begin: If you have already installed the Windows 7 Beta version on your PC, you'll need to back up your......
- Writing More Informative Articles Submitting your quality content, and keyword rich articles, is your first step to achieving your personal or business related goals. However, many article writers are scratching their heads wondering why their articles are not picked up by publishers and webmasters to be placed on their websites. This does not have to be the case......
- Is RSS E-Mail 2.0 a Ripoff? Recently, I tested Pawan Agrawal's RSS E-mail 2.0 to see if it lived up to the hype I read on the sales page. As you may know by now, after 20 years in the direct-marketing industry, I've experienced my share of hype and ripoffs... Following is my personal, unbiased review......
- MomPreneurs: Dealing with Isolation, Stress & Motivation You work from home. Your children are at home. Some days you spend 24 hours a day at your home and the only ones you see and talk to are your children, your pets and your spouse if you’re married. The checkout clerk at the local grocery has suddenly become......
- 10 Tips To Increase Traffic To Blog At this present writing, there are more than 115 Million blogs worldwide. The majority of these blogs are strictly for the purpose of making money. Unfortunately, the majority of these bloggers are failing miserably at making money with blogs. The reasons for such a high failure rate vary from: too......
- Making a List, Checking it Twice: Needing a Licensed Plumber The time to make a list of plumbers that are licensed is not when there is a plumbing emergency. When a person needs a licensed plumber, the last thing he wants to do or even has the time luxury to do, is to check to see what that plumber's qualifications......
- 7 Ways to Keep From Getting Discouraged at the Gym When you're first starting out with your exercise plan, it is all too easy to get discouraged. Working out is not always easy and if you don't take the right approach, quitting can be all too simple. However there are some techniques that you can use to make sure......
- A little history... I am going to use this time to breakdown a little bit about how this all came about. It's going to be a long one. So sit back and get ready to read. Read about me real quick before you read below: About the Fat Man It all dates back......
- Sunday Money Roundup - On The Train Again. We are doing it again this year - hitting the road for the holiday on an Amtrak train! We are going from Albuquerque to Chicago to Boston and back, over the span of a few weeks. That's the benefit of both working for yourself and having a wife who is......
- crowdsourcing photo credit: davidChief If you've ever visited a doctor about an ache in your shoulder you've probably been given the cliched-but-true advice "get a second opinion." What if, instead of just getting two opinions you could get three? Eighteen? 48,132? That's the principal behind crowdsourcing. Crowdsourcing is - at......
Leave a Reply