NVR Retail Viral E-Mail and Marketing.

Every marketer knows that to gauge the performance of a given email marketing campaign, it is important to capture relevant, insightful, and actionable data. This means tracking your campaigns beyond simple delivery statistics, such as the number of emails sent or opened. It also means tracking your campaigns beyond basic click-through statistics. Too many marketers rely on click-through reports to determine the effectiveness of their campaigns; deep down, though, they know that click-through alone represents very little value to the performance of their marketing programs. Only conversion data — the tracking of each sale, download, registration, etc. — from a given campaign truly illustrates the return on a marketing investment. Using conversion data as the foundation, marketers can then build a framework to weigh each potential conversion relative to one another. For example, an email marketing program may be trying to drive home-page visits as well as sales. The better the landing page the better the ROI. If the first mailing generated 500 sales and 10,000 home-page visits, is it preferable to the second mailing, which generated 600 sales and 6,000 home-page visits? The answer depends on how the marketer values each response.

Multiplying the sum of each response type by the weight in the index, the first mailing would have a score of 1,000 (500 x 1.00 + 10,000 x 0.05 = 1,000), and the second mailing would have a score of 900 (600 x 1.00 + 6,000 x 0.05 = 900). Therefore, the first mailing outperformed the second mailing! It is preferable, in this case, to have 500 sales and 10,000 home-page visits rather than 600 sales and 6,000 home-page visits -- an outcome that may have been more difficult to determine without an index.

At the end of the day, it’s about providing value to each one of your customers. Tracking which elements in your email marketing messages are driving your customers to respond and using an index to help quantify those responses can help you optimize your campaigns so that you’ll get more of what you want. And so will your customers.

What are some good rules for viral marketing?

Offer an enticement.

Viral marketing works best when a valuable and tangible incentive is offered, encouraging individuals to forward an email message to their friends. However, marketers should cap the incentive to a specific quantity to avoid spam-like distribution of the message — for example, offering an incentive of 20 percent off referrers’ next purchase if they forward the message to five friends. Open-ended incentives, such as offering a $5 credit for every five friends referred, can end up causing a marketer customer service, financial, and privacy-related problems.

Example:

A women’s athletic clothing multichannel retailer recently offered a creative and socially aware incentive when it launched a viral marketing campaign that rewarded message recipients with a free T-shirt and a $1 donation to the Breast Cancer Foundation when an individual sent the special email message to five friends and three of those friends opted in to the retailer’s catalog or email list. The campaign was tremendously successful, driving a click-through rate three times higher than normal, an email newsletter sign-up rate of over 30 percent, and a catalog subscription rate of nearly 70 percent. Meanwhile, cost per sale decreased by 89 percent.

Don’t consider the referral an opt-in.

When a customer refers a friend, the referral should not be considered an opt-in. A name and email address volunteered by a person’s friend does not constitute an opt-in by the individual, so the data should be deleted immediately after the referral email is sent. Verbiage should be included in the referral email asking if the individual would like to receive future mailings, allowing her to opt in if she wishes.

Personalize the referral email. Response rates increase dramatically when users can see that a message is coming from a friend, so it is best to personalize the email message to show that it’s coming from a recognizable source. The subject line is the key component in a viral marketing email, because it can immediately identify the email as friendly. A good subject line may read: “ADV: John Doe Thought You’d Like 20% Off at XYZ.com,” thereby identifying that it is an advertisement, there’s a special offer, and the message was sent from a friend.

Track and analyze the results.

As with any marketing campaign, tracking the results and optimizing performance over time is absolutely necessary. Thankfully, sophisticated email marketers can track insightful and actionable data that can be used to evaluate performance. Important metrics to analyze are pass-along, click-through, and conversion rates. Marketers should separate the click-through and conversion rates by original customers from referrals and evaluate their respective performances. These metrics will alert a marketer to which offers and customers drive the highest ROI

Continually promote friendly referrals.

Marketers who want to have their messages frequently forwarded should place a viral marketing offer in every relevant outgoing email message. Viral marketing makes for a great one-time campaign, but it can also be a very effective tool for continuing to broaden the reach of your marketing messages over time.

Tieing it all together.

Todays savvy marketers know that viral email tied to SEO, SEM, Banners and Blogs will turbo results and spread the message three times as fast as just viral email. Because of the inherent structure of Facebook,Twitter, Del… and the way its different applications and components work, these are  phenomenal social sites for Internet Viral Marketing. 

Viral marketing refers to using available social networks to market a product, brand, or person by way of “viral processes”, similar to the way a flu virus would pass from one person to another, multiplying exponentially with each “exposure” — leading to an “epidemic”. 

Because of the popularity of Facebook and the way “news” spreads on the site, your note to someone about your new e-book can be seen in short time by hundreds of people The addition of video and interactive media to include embedded items encouraging repeat visits, always ensure ROI at increased levals. If the projected hook is visualy stimulating, with a clear value  the refferal is more apt to join the process. The real test is again at the end of the day, forget all the fancy talk. Show me the money!