The broader your digital marketing campaign is the more successful your company will be. Viral marketing, introduced by Steve Jurvetson and Tim Draper in 1997, is the quickest way to increase awareness, sales or profit.
Components of viral campaigns
Analysing the negative emotions of passed along emails allows marketers to improve the ‘viralability‘ and success of email campaigns.
- Make sure the message is relevant to the recipient
- Increase trust by allowing recipients to be easily taken off email lists
- Make email messages as personal as possible. Names and locations are a great place to start.
- Keep messages simple. Simplicity is complex enough.
Each paragraph needs to be written critically and make sense in its own right. Keep critical writing interesting by, for example, including interesting points and questions within the body of text.
Depending upon the email campaign it may be appropriate for a company to complete a good deed to further increase email campaign success: Good deed emails have the highest percentage of email forwarding.
Formats and viral campaigns
Any format can go viral. Text viralability, for example, is possible so long as the text and message is clear. Textual tweets are one of the most effective examples of virability because a short message, with a clear focus, can receive lots of favourites and retweets. Emotional and thought provoking text goes hand-in-hand with viral campaigns because the impact is so great it makes you think and act.
Using other formats allows you to have more control of emotional and intellectual high and lows. Videos, for instance, allow you to control what someone sees and does not see because videos are watched sequentially: We watch videos in the order they are shown rather than skipping a paragraph to find out where a plot is going. Recently videos are incorporating short, mouse over, previews but most of us watch videos in the order they are shown.
Mobile emails. Copyright of Digitpedia Com.
HTML emails can get even more attention because of visual stimulants. Even if you are not creating viral email campaigns it is a good idea to include email signatures to your web 2.0 accounts. You are indirectly allowing the recipient to choose more than 1 communication medium to respond to you.
Posted by Gerald Murphy
References
- Knight, C. (1999) Viral Marketing. Boardwatch Magazine.
- Phelps, J. Lewis, R. Mobilio, L. Perry, D. and Raman, N. (2004) Viral Marketing or Electonic Word-of-Mouth Advertising: Examing Consumer Responses and Motivation to Pass Along Email. Journal of Advertising Research. pp. 333 — 348
Gerald Murphy 