Let’s talk a little bit about successful viral e-mail marketing. The whole point of e-mail marketing is to get your message into the inbox of as many people as possible. Wouldn’t it be even better if you could just have other people do your job for you? By that I mean, wouldn’t it be great if you could just send an e-mail out to 100 people, but have those 100 people send it out to three people each? Suddenly your reach has grown by three-fold! That’s what viral marketing is all about.
So, how do you get your e-mails to go viral? The secret behind going viral is to give your readers something that they really enjoy. If they like what you send them, they will be very likely to send off your e-mail to their family and friends. Successful viral e-mail marketing is all about getting your message to as many people as possible by having other people ‘spread the word’, so give your readers what they really want?
What do they want? Well, recent studies have shown that internet users forward e-mails with humorous content more often than any other kind of e-mail. If your e-mail message makes someone laugh, then there’s a great chance that they will want to forward it to their friends and everyone else in their e-mail address book! That’s the real secret!
Here’s a great example – several years ago a picture went incredibly viral through forwarded e-mails. Millions of people saw it – you may have received it in your own e-mail inbox. It was a photograph of Ronald McDonald (the clown mascot of the fast food spot – McDonald’s) being hauled off by the cops in handcuffs. Apparently, a person dressed up in the clown’s suit had been somewhere that he was not supposed to be. It was making light of the serious situation of someone being arrested. But, it was also a HUGE free advertisement for McDonald’s. It made people think about Ronald McDonald. With his image fresh in their memory, they were more likely to hop to a McDonald’s next time they were hungry.
Now, of course you don’t own a multi-national brand like McDonald’s and that’s okay – you can still benefit from viral e-mail marketing. Some starter ideas would be to include a funny comic strip with your marketing message. Or you could create a funny cartoon that pokes fun at a popular social idea (like a politician) and post a link to your website in the corner of the cartoon. There really are a million things that you could do to start getting your message to go viral!
