Viral Email Marketing

When used responsibly, viral email marketing can be a powerful community-building, brand-building, and list-building tool. Gone wrong, it can result in legitimate campaigns being perceived as spam, reflecting poorly on your company and your brand. However, there are things you can do to reduce the likelihood of being labeled a spammer and, at the same time, get better results from your viral email marketing campaigns.

Make sure it’s appropriate to add a forward message. The first step is to consider whether you should even mention forwarding at all!

If forwarding will help you achieve your primary goal, make your forward message strong and visible within your layout. Don’t distract readers from your main message unnecessarily.

Recipients who forward may not stop to consider that someone else might not want to receive the email.

While offering incentives for forwarding can be highly rewarding-for both you and the forwarder-it may inadvertently encourage inappropriate forwarding.

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.

Review your message to address the needs of any new recipients, not just the people on your original list with whom you already have a relationship.

Always include your company name, logo and website address in each and every email that you send.

Your email campaign will be most successful if you choose an email format preferred by your audience.

When you determine how many people forwarded your email, how many times each person forwarded it, the number of additional click-throughs gained by forwarding, and which people became new subscribers as a result.

Measuring viral activity is only possible if your readers click on the forward link you embed in your email message.

Your forward link appears as a clickable word or phrase.

Do your research. Read success stories. Learn from the mistakes and successes of other email marketers.