A successful viral marketing campaign is seen as the Holy Grail for many marketers. The ability to reach many more prospects from much a small list, along with the added power in the message a referral gives makes it the ultimate marketing tool.

For many marketers the risk is also quite small – the cost of viral campaigns are minimal compared to many other forms of marketing that bring the same exposure.

However there has been a spate of poorly executed campaigns that have not been given any thought and have failed in their attempts to spread a message to a wider audience.

This article looks at how you can utilise Viral Marketing effectively.

How can I use Viral Marketing?

Viral marketing is not just the emailing of a Flash based game or a movie.

The simplest form of viral marketing is simply the ‘Forward to a friend’ link or form. Once you have set this up it can be used again and again. It won’t generate huge amounts of additional traffic but the traffic it generates is highly targeted because the referrer knows that it is something the recipient will be interested in.

More complicated viral campaigns can revolve around the following:

• Competitions
• Games
• Movies and humour

For these campaigns to work there needs to be two factors in place:

1) An ‘Impact Factor’
2) Incentives to transmit

Without these recipients will not forward your email.

The impact factor is what makes the email transmit quickly such as a funny video clip, a flash based game or an online competition.

Where marketers do get this wrong is where the ‘impact factor’ simply has no impact. Most people would have at some time received a flash game from their bank or insurance company. The game would probably revolve around some tenuous link to the company’s products such as catching falling money into a bag.

This sort of viral marketing will not work because no one would want the embarrassment of forwarding something like this. Choosing the right impact factor for your business is vital – there is a balance to be achieved between creating the necessary impact to achieve fast transmission and the relevance to your company and its products. Admittedly it is a lot harder to do this in traditional B2B industries and B2C financial services where you are generally limited to competitions and prize draws.

The incentive factor is also vital – try some of the following:

• Offer an additional entry to a prize draw for every additional person the recipient forwards it to.
• Offer a discount voucher when the recipient forwards the email to five friends.

When designing a viral campaign it is also important to bear the following in mind to maximise the success.

1) Collect opt-in’s to your newsletter

If your email is being sent to thousands of people then why not get them to opt-in to your newsletter? Using viral marketing is one of the most effective ways of building your own opt-in list.

Remember though that you cannot send any further emails to addresses you have collected via viral marketing without collecting their opt-in.

2) Avoid the following in your campaigns….

• Asking for too much information when asking to refer a friend. Keep it down to first name, email address and nothing else.
• Using a medium that your list cannot handle – don’t use bandwidth draining Flash games, videos or complicated viral mechanisms where your recipients technology cannot cope.

What transmission rates can I expect?

It is never easy to judge how successful a campaign will be. It all depends on the incentive, impact factor and the usual factors you would look at in the campaign such as:

• Timing
• Subject Lines
• Relevance

Typical viral campaign results we have achieved in recent months for our clients include:

• 29% pass on rate for a special retail promotion based around a hosted flash based game.
• 2% pass on rate from a regular travel newsletter with a simple forward to a friend option.

You can of course get much higher rates than this – indeed in past campaigns we have achieved a pass on rate of nearly 200%. However to say this is the norm would not be setting correct expectation levels.

To discuss a potential viral campaign further with Emailcenter, and for our advice call us on 01327 350921.