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Viral marketing is one of those methods that precedes the birth of the internet. To add to the excitement, all the social sites and networks plus sites like YouTube have radically changed the face of what viral means. People all over the world are revealing so much about themselves in unprecedented ways. This just goes on to show that viral marketing is in full throttle, and the regular word of mouth has taken a whole new meaning with the birth of the World Wide Web.

You will need to think about the market in which you are trying to force a viral campaign. All you can do is create it and let it go, and if it goes viral then you will not be the first to know, usually.

This is why you should focus on being patient when it comes to achieving results from your campaign. It is true that you really never know what will set people off in a viral way. These viral events are not all that frequent, and when they happen they just suddenly come out of nowhere. The key here lies in laying down a perfect foundation that makes it easy for you to grow your viral marketing campaign and take it to the next level. Most people who try to make something viral usually do not succeed. If something you do becomes viral, then all you really can do is watch it and respond to people if they talk to you. The success of the idea proves that it’s worthy, which is why you should spend more time on improving it even after launching it. The best viral campaigns are very direct and not complicated. The easier you make everything, then you will greatly increase your chances of something going viral. Whatever you do, it has to be a total no-brainer for people to talk about it or spread it. There are lots of examples of this principle in action on the net, and you have seen many of them. The key to all this is make people aware of it as it is being spread, and that is often just some kind of message or ad. That little ad is powerful, and it actually causes people to become drawn into the viral mechanism. The easier you make it, the more powerful it becomes.

You can create a buzz about your business that approaches viral, and the key to doing so is when you go out of your way to care about your customers. Remember if you want to drive a point home with your customers, then always avoid talking about it and then keep showing them with your actions. When you always do that, then people remember and they will tell others about it. When you sincerely help people, then they do remember that and will tell others. When you make the effort to help people, then you will see that they remember that and talk about it.

Viral marketing has huge potential for any business that decides to use it in a creative way. Creating an impact in your target market with the right viral marketing campaign requires you to have a good understanding of it, and at the same time you should know your own product inside out.

With viral marketing the principal objective is to increase awareness of a product, service or concept using word-of-mouth behaviours. To put it into context, where spam is based on massive distribution of unsolicited emails, viral emails use popular social networking aspects to achieve their goal of reaching the masses.

The development of a viral email is pretty straightforward. An individual will receive a message that can be of any nature really (something with a humorous tone is almost always effective, but try not to insult), which they then pass on to their friends using the “forward to a friend” or “share on a social network” button, strategically placed in the email campaign. Secondary recipients can clearly see and trust where the email comes from and therefore the chance of it getting opened is greatly increased. They in turn then do the same thing, and so forth. The concept is similar to that of an email chain letter, except of course there is no explicit requirement to forward it. A viral email is spread because the content that’s in it is relevant and (this is important), there is true value in passing it on.

A viral email is very similar to a real virus, and is in fact where the name comes from, duh. Think about it like this: a virus starts out as a single entity, with the potential to increase exponentially to the point that it dominates. It uses a host and their resources to grow, replicate and double with each interaction. Clever little organisms really, the hard work is done for them, they just have to find the right host to start out with – much like choosing the right recipients for your first viral email campaign.

Recently there have been great examples of hugely successful viral email marketing campaigns. One that you might be familiar with is that of Threshers – the UK off-licence retail chain. They emailed vouchers to staff and suppliers, which were then redistributed by them. This proved so successful that many branches ran out stock when people went to cash in on the deal. On top of this, the story made headlines all over Europe and the Internet was filled with news of this ‘viral campaign.’ According to Threshers however, it was not an intended viral email campaign although due to its phenomenal success, they initiated a similar campaign the following year, with similar levels of success.

Hotmail.com is another superb example of a viral email campaign that resulted in the number of people registering for a free Hotmail account climb rapidly into the millions, literally within a few days. The strategy was unbelievably simple; each email that was sent out from an existing Hotmail account had a tag at the end of it which read: “Get your private, free email at hotmail.com. “

To give you more of an idea of the potential success of a viral email, I rustled up these stats, courtesy of EmailStatCenter:

• 20% of Facebook, MySpace and/or Twitter users have posted or shared something from permission email to their social account(s) via a “share” option.
• 32% of marketers say they’d share promotional email offers with members inside a social network and open emails from others.

Based on these examples and healthy stats, you might very well be thinking at this stage that it’s something you’d be interested in trying out. And so you should. I’ve summed up a few best practices for you to follow to help ensure your viral email campaign gets sent off without a hitch (and potentially make the news).

1. Make it Unique

Think about what makes you respond to an email and take action. It’s probably because it contains something unique, something that makes you laugh, and something that shocks you, something that excites you or maybe even something that makes you rethink your perspective on an important issue. You want your campaign to have a similar effect, so think very carefully about your content and the information you are about to potentially have sent to thousands of people. Think outside of the box and don’t be too quick to fall back on ideas that ‘normally work’. Your new angle could take you to new heights of success.

2. Offer a Reward of Substantial Value

Make sure what you are offering has substantial value – this can be in the form of giving something away for free (products, services, white papers or reports for example) or offering a tempting discount or coupon (with an expiry date.) Of course, if your offer is of material value make sure that you have enough stock, or the capacity to deliver on your promise, in a timely manner. There is little worse than offering a reward and not being able to make good on it. You’ll immediately loose the trust of your customers and any further campaigns you send out will inevitably get ignored. On the other hand, deliver as promised and word of your company will spread like wild fire.

3. Send to a Select Target Audience

You don’t want to appear as a spammer, which is why your initial email should be sent to a select audience. It’s also why you’re going to tell your recipients not to just forward the message any old way to any old person. If they’re going to pass it on, it’s important that they use the special ‘forward to a friend’ or ’share’ button in the body of your email. This will allow you to track it easily and get the stats you need, as opposed to if they just forwarded the email regularly, in which case you won’t be able to track it from that point on. A viral email might start off small, like a real virus, but it grows and spreads extremely fast. Remember that offering incentives for forwarding may increase the amount of forwarding but it might also increase the chances that recipients will spam their entire mailing list, which could very certainly have negative effects on your company’s brand. Therefore it’s vital that you make it clear to your readers that they too should be highly selective over who they choose to share the email with.

4. Check and Optimize Your Message Format

Have you checked the format for your message? Do you have an HTML and plain text message and have you optimized your message for recipients that open and share emails on mobile devices? According to an article on Econsultany.com, 20% of email sent by retailers is opened on a mobile device. Use this to your advantage and plan strategically.

5. Bold Branding and Logo Placement

How clear is your branding, logo, website and contact details, are they immediately visible? Without this, it doesn’t matter how huge your campaign gets, if it can’t be attributed to you then what’s the point?

6. As Always – Don’t Forget a Call to Action

As always, make sure you’re telling your recipients exactly what they need to do and how. Including a strong call to action in your email might be advice that’s drummed in your ears all the time, but it’s for good reason. If you don’t tell someone what they need to do, they won’t do it. Simple. In the case of a viral email, your call to action might be along the lines of “share on your social networks” or “forward this to a friend now”. Make sure this feature is also immediately visible.

7. Your Follow-Up Campaign

Based on the stats and feedback you get regarding your first campaign, you could consider sending up a follow up, targeting those that responded positively to your efforts the first time. This could be in the form of a survey of the campaign results; people are often interested to see how their actions affect the overall results of a project. If you previously sent a video you could consider sending the unedited version, especially if it has humorous footage. This will also help you appear as more ‘human’ to your customers. Another idea would be to let them know if you have any further promotions or specials running or remind them where they can redeem their vouchers or coupons if you included one in your first campaign as reward for forwarding your message.

Although concocting a viral email campaign might be considered ‘fun’, if only to see how far it goes, it’s vital that you still follow best practices to help ensure that it adheres to anti-spam laws and reaches the inbox of your target audience. The purpose of your campaign remains the same as that of a traditional email campaign in that it is there to inform your subscribers, make an offer, share important (or humorous) news, create awareness for your brand and ultimately develop lasting relationships with your customers.

Do you know what viral marketing is?

It means marketing technique that uses social networks for advertising various products. Thus they achieve their marketing goals and increase product sales. Viral promotions may be spread in the form of interactive flash games, video clips, eBooks, images, or text messages.

Examples of the viral marketing schemes are: ponzi schemes (and pyramid schemes), multi-level marketing (Amway, Mary Kay) and many others.

There are many viral marketing concepts. This type of marketing increases online sales. Free email services on the Internet give demonstrative examples of viral marketing. Free email services mean free advertising as the sent messages contain promotion and in addition advertising in the interfaces. And thus this type of marketing concept is utilized on a zero budget.

Articles and tutorials are great viral market instrument too and intensive traffic to the definite web sites may be created with their help.

One more popular concept of viral marketing is utilizing newsletters and ezines. Newsletters build content for sites and increase their visibility for search engines. The level of ezines has declined lately and if your newsletters will be interesting and informative, they will add your site popular appeal.

EBooks can be created with the definite software and they are good as viral tools, especially coming together with podcasts and whitepapers.

If you want to amuse people and add not only informational items but some entertainment too, use amusing images, jokes, flash games and presentations. But using this strategy you must be sure that the content is relevant to your site. Monitor your content thoroughly and control every joke or image if you want to draw attention to your cherished web child.

To create these items, hire a freelancer with graphic and programming skills. By the way, you may be pleasantly surprised that it is not expensive at all.