Viral Email Marketing

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• Viral Email Marketing

KStephan Spencer President Netconcepts
Put Kimberlys picture here if available
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Who doesnt get enough email?
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Reaching todays consumer

• Corporate scandals erode trust
• Growing marketing resistance
• Receives 100 emails a day(10-20 from people you
  know)
• Want to be treated as people, not a mass market
• Spam is in the eye of the beholder

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Coping with the deluge

• 32 of email messages are official spam(Radicati
  Group)
• Costs 8.9 billion in lost productivity
  annually(Ferris Research)
• Spam filters in Outlook, Hotmail, AOL etc.
  Anti-spam tools at the ISPs Corporate email
  firewalls
• 15 of permission-based marketing messages are
  wrongly blocked (Assurance Systems)

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(Nothing reeks of SPAM more than a message
claiming not to be SPAM.)
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Stop marketing at people

• Interruption marketing just doesnt work anymore
• Unanticipated, impersonal, and irrelevant ads
  wont break through the data smog
• Get out of the way and let people market your
  products/services to each other

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What is viral marketing?

• Word of mouth marketing augmented by digital
  communication
• Facilitate the process of people referring their
  friends and colleagues
• to purchase your products, visit your site, sign
  up for a free trial, subscribe to your
  newsletter, etc.

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Word-of-Mouth on steroids

• Traditional WOM
• Travels slowly
• Dies off
• E.g. recommend a book to some friends

• Digitally augmented WOM
• Spreads fast
• Travels far
• Exponential growth (amplification)
• E.g. Hotmail

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Some new jargon

• Sneezer, ideavirus, vector, hive, tipping point,
  connector, maven, promiscuous, powerful, smooth,
  amplifier, persistence, word-of-mouse, network
  effect, Law of the Few, Zipfs Law, Metcalfs
  Law, compounding effect, etc.
• Gotta love buzzwords!

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Put together the right offer

• Is your idea virusworthy?
• Ideaviruses love a vacuum

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Whos going to spread your message?

• Seth Godin calls them sneezers
• Promiscuous sneezers - have their price
• Powerful sneezers - cant be bought difficult
  to predict what will motivate them
• Malcolm Gladwell breaks them out differently
• Connectors - masters of the loose tie, seem
  to know everybody
• Mavens - genuinely helpful
• Salespeople - born to sell

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Divide and conquer

• Go after a demographic or psychographic group
  where your ideavirus can dominate
• Like people hang out together (e.g. the affluent
  mix in the same circles)
• Target those sympathetic to your cause
• BMW dealership - dont target Ford owners

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Observe whos sneezing!

• Identify your top sneezers by tracking ratio of
  unique opens for each message sent
• 0 didnt open
• 1 recipient opened but didnt forward
• 2 recipient probably forwarded (unless they
  check mail from multiple PCs)
• Reward and incent these sneezers! Theyre worth
  their weight in gold.

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Rewarding your sneezers

• Dont insist that a referrers friend become a
  customer to earn the incentive. Thats outside
  his/her control.
• Make sure the incentive is relevant to the
  recipient.
• It doesnt have to be expensive.
• e.g. golf balls with the recipients name printed
  on them
• DONT change the rules mid-campaign

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Gotta give to get

• Dont just give a speech and leave
• Fly in your customers to tell their stories
• Sponsor a cocktail party afterward
• Dont just tell them how your product is safe and
  secure give them a first aid kit for their car
• 3M Post-It Notes
• Secretary of 3Ms chairman sent a free case to
  secretaries of chairmen of the Fortune 500
• MCI Mail
• Blew it - built friction into the system by
  charging instead of giving it away to build
  critical mass

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Network Effect

• Metcalfs Law - the value of a network increases
  with the square of the number of people using it
• A world with 1000 fax machines is 250,000 times
  better than one with only 2

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Power of bestseller lists

• Zipfs Law - 1 is MUCH more popular than 2
• Stanford study artificially boosting bestseller
  status of downloaded files
• Self fulfilling prophecy
• If you cant dominate one, create your own

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Make it easy to spread

• Ask recipients to forward your e-newsletter,
  email, or SMS message to friends
• Include on your site Email this page to a
  friend buttons to refer your articles, products,
  etc.
• Make it a fill-in form that allows the visitor to
  pass it on to a number of people at once
• e.g. Ideavirus.coms Send It page

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Soft sell

• Not a blatant, in-your-face demand but an
  informal invitation
• Should not smack of commercialism or spam
• e.g. a blank postcard with a funny cartoon
  referencing the book and its topic

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The customer is in control

• Of the content
• Of the frequency
• Of the relationship

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Success Stories

• Hotmail
• Unleashing the Ideavirus
• Blue Mountain Arts
• Budweiser parody
• HOTorNOT.com
• Yahoos Most Emailed Photos

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Hotmail

• Appended a small plug to every outgoing email
  Get Your Private, Free Email at
  http//www.hotmail.com
• Founded in 1996. By Summer 1998, had 25 million
  active accounts
• Signs up over 150,000 subscribers per day, each
  of them profiles themselves upon registering
• Founder (Sabeer Bhatia) sold to Microsoft for
  500 million
• Sabeer invented the term viral marketing

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Unleashing the Ideavirus

• Book by Seth Godin - in paperback, hardcover, and
  e-book format
• Free to download from the web at
  www.ideavirus.com
• Web site also allows you to easily email it to
  all your friends
• Most downloaded e-book in history
• An Amazon.com best seller

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Blue Mountain Arts

• Online greeting card site (bluemountain.com)
• Sender chooses an e-card on the site, site then
  sends an email to the recipient prompting them to
  click on the link to pick up the card
• Recipient is encouraged to send their own e-card

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Budweiser Parody

• Wassup Superfriends
• Budweiser, wisely, didnt interfere
• Further burned Budweisers brand and ad campaign
  into our subconscious

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HOTorNOT.com

• Formerly AmIHotorNot.com
• View photos of strangers and rate their looks
  from 1 to 10 or post your own photo
• Launched by 2 unemployed Californians on a whim
  and with no funding
• Was a MediaMetrix Top 50 most visited site
• Peaked at 14.8 million page views in a single day

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Yahoo News Most Emailed Photos

• Not only allows visitors to email news photos,
  lets them see what others are emailing
• Utilizes the power of Top Ten Lists

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Word of Mouth can bite you!

• Southwest
• Amazon.com
• An email marketing agency

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(Typos AND broken links in a newsletter from
an email marketing agency, no less!)
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Some natural laws of email marketing

• Define business objectives
• Obtain permission
• Deliver relevant value
• Get personal
• Make it easy to do business
• Continue the dialogue
• Nurture the relationship

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1) Define business objectives

• Audience
• Prospects, customers, advocates, partners
• Goals
• Registrations, Signups, Sales
• Content
• Newsletter, Promotions, Reminders, Invitations
• Metrics
• Click through, Registration, Visits, Purchase

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2) Obtain permission

• Opt-in, not opt-out
• Abide by visible and clear Privacy Policy
• Avoid purchasing lists
• Rent lists with caution

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2) Obtain permission

• Place list sign-up on all forms on your site,
  including inquiry, order, and feedback forms
• Minimize amount of work required to sign up
• Collect more than just email address
• Make it easy to manage subscriptions
• Unsubscribe urban legend

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(Thanks United. You make it oh-so-easy to
unsubscribe.)
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3) Deliver relevant value

• Segment
• Demographics, psychographics, clickographics
• Target most profitable or most likely to respond
• Personalize
• Recognize the relationship with the recipient
• Tailor the offer to the individual.
• Provide customized content specific to interests
• Greet by first name, perhaps in Subject line too.

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(Oops! Thats not my name!)
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3) Deliver relevant value

• Compel them to open or get deleted
• Avoid chest pounding and promotions.
• Relate to their problem
• The gift of education
• First few lines are key (WIIFM)
• Appropriate Formatting (text/HTML/graphics)

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(Jupiter should have tested on multiple email
clients.)
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4) Get personal

• Be forthright (people trust people, not
  marketing speak).
• Full disclosure - No hidden advertorials
• Develop a voice and unique personality
• Signed by a real person
• Keep it short and sweet

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5) Make it easy

• Usability
• Scannable copy
• Compatibility
• Graphic Design
• Style
• Grammar
• Legibility
• Fonts
• Layout

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5) Make it easy

• Order/contact
• Add to cart
• Preload forms
• Event registration
• Change preferences
• Frequency, formats

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6) Continue the dialog

• Regular contact is required to stand out
• Frequency depends on audience expectations
• Promotions Vary contacts to avoid burnout
• Newsletter Send regularly at the same time
• Best time to send Tuesday through Thursday
• Test, Test, Test

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6) Continue the dialog

• Metrics for Success
• Unsubscribe rate
• Bounce rate
• Unique open rate
• Total open rate
• Click-through rate
• Conversion rate

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7) Nurture the relationship

• Apply to website and other channels
• Integrate with CRM
• Turn customers into advocates

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In summary

• Essential prerequisites to successful email
  marketing
• Define business objectives
• Obtain permission
• Deliver relevant value
• Get personal
• Make it easy to do business
• Continue the dialogue
• Nurture the relationship

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In summary

• Viral marketing dwarfs traditional WOM
• Identify your best sneezers
• Make a compelling offering and exploit the
  sneezers motivations
• Make it easy to spread (smooth)
• You can influence, but not control

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Further Reading

• Unleashing the Ideavirus by Seth Godin
• The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell
• www.digitrends.net/marketing/13640_10856.html
• www.cbi.cgey.com/journal/issue6/unleashIdea.html
• www.webdevelopersjournal.com/articles/site_promoti
  on/sticky_viral_site.html
• www.wellsfargo.com/biz/products/resources/advisor/
  archives/08viral/07viral.jhtml

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Further Reading

• Successful Email Marketing by Debbie Mayo-Smith
• Marketing With E-Mail by Shannon Kinnard
• Permission Marketing by Seth Godin

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Critiques!
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Questions?
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Thank you!

• For copies of todays presentation
• and some worksheets checklists
• e-mail your request to
• iworld_at_netconcepts.com
• To contact Stephan
• Call 608-285-6600
• sspencer_at_netconcepts.com