Inbound Marketing Blog

Email marketing can provide wonderful support for your web site and Internet marketing efforts. But do it wisely....

Email Advertising and Marketing:
If you're smart you won't even think of developing an internet marketing plan &  web site without marrying it to a strategically created e-mail publication plan. The web site is the shy partner who passively waits for people to come to him. But the e-mail marketing strategy is the bold, active partner who goes out to where people are and invites them to come meet her groom. Together they make a great couple.

E-mail marketing is primarily a way to conserve the people who have shown some interest in your business by coming to your web site or responding to one of your offers. One of the highest priorities of your web site MUST be to get your visitor to sign up for your free newsletter, white paper, discussion list or updates publication. Offer a variety of inducements or compelling offers -- entry into a contest, a free gift, a free coupon -- whatever you must do to insure a steady stream of subscribers to your newsletter. Once they are subscribers -- if you give them "great content" they enjoy and learn from -- they'll stay with you for years, and you can gently build their trust and your relationship month after month. When they're ready to make a purchase, your site is at the top of their mind, and they'll probably buy from you. Figure the lifetime value to you of a single subscriber. When you've completed this exercise, you'll know why beginning your own e-mail marketing stratgey is so vital to marketing your business.

Though some Internet marketers focus on sending stand-alone e-mail ads to their mailing lists, I do not recommend this method. With so much SPAM (unsolicited e-mail) abounding, it's too easy for recipients to mistake your promotion for just another ad, and unsubscribe forever. Though an occasional promotional e-mail may be okay, your email marketing messages in the context of news and helpful information is much more effective, and builds loyalty that you can never gain by just bombarding your customers with ads.

Of course, you probably know by now that sending out mass e-mails to huge lists of e-mail addresses is a no-no. It violates the principle of Permission Marketing that says people respond better to a marketing message they have agreed to receive. Unsolicited Commercial E-Mail (UCE) also runs contrary to a long-standing Internet tradition that responds to SPAM with angry flames and enough returned e-mail to cause your ISP to shut down your account very quickly. If you're interested in building a long-term business based on trust, don't send SPAM.

Viral marketing or viral traffic is a result of good inbound marketing.

Create a compelling offer or content and spread the word to qualified, interested prospects.

Viral Marketing Explained
The term "viral marketing" at its basis can somewhat be offensive. Go ahead and call yourself a Viral Marketer and people may take two steps back. "Do they have a vaccine for that yet?" they wonder. A virus is a sinister thing, fraught with doom, it is not quite dead yet not fully alive.

But you have to admire the virus. He lives unaware to the host and uses its resources to increase in number until he is so numerous that he wins by sheer weight of numbers.

Viral Marketing Defined
What does a virus have to do with inbound marketing? Viral marketing describes any strategy that encourages individuals to pass on a marketing message to others, creating the potential for exponential growth in the message's exposure and influence. Like viruses, such strategies take advantage of rapid multiplication to expose the message to thousands and sometimes millions.

Off the Internet, viral marketing has been referred to as word-of-mouth, but on the Internet, for better or worse, it's called viral marketing.

Example: The Classic Hotmail.com
The classic example of viral marketing is Hotmail.com, one of the first free Web-based e-mail services. The strategy is simple:

• Give away free e-mail addresses and services

• Attach a simple inbound marketing message at the bottom of every e-mail saying, "Get your private, free email at http://www.hotmail.com"

• People e-mail to their network of friends and associates

• Each person sees the message

• People sign up for their own free e-mail service, and then
• These new subscribers then propel the message still wider

This is a great example of a carefully designed viral marketing strategy that ripples outward extremely rapidly.

Elements of a Viral Marketing Strategy:
Some viral marketing strategies work better than others, and few work as well as the simple Hotmail.com strategy. Below are six basic elements that you should consider in your strategy and inbound marketing program. A viral marketing strategy does not need to contain all of these elements, but the more elements it embraces, the more powerful the results are likely to be. An effective viral marketing strategy:

1. Gives away products and/or services
2. Provides for effortless transfer to others
3. Scales easily from small to large
4. Exploits common consumer motivations and behaviors
5. Utilizes existing communication networks
6. Takes advantage of others' resources

Below examines each strategy more in-depth:

1. Gives away valuable products or services - "Free" is the most powerful word in a marketer's vocabulary. Most viral marketing programs give away valuable products or services to attract attention. Free e-mail services, free information, free software programs, etc. This part of your inbound marketing campaign may not profit right away, but if it can generate a groundswell of interest, rest assured, you will be able to profit at some point. Patience is key here. Free attracts people. People then see other desirable things that you are selling, and, this is how you earn money. Give away something, sell something.
2. Provides for effortless transfer to others - The medium that carries your marketing message must be easy to transfer and replicate. Viral marketing works famously as part of an Internet marketing plan because instant communication has become so easy and inexpensive. From a marketing standpoint, you must simplify your marketing message so it can be transmitted easily and without degradation. Short is better. The classic is: "Get your private, free email at http://www.hotmail.com." The message is compelling, compressed, and copied at the bottom of every free e-mail message.
3. Scales easily from small to large - To spread like wildfire the transmission method must be rapidly scalable from small to large. The weakness of the Hotmail model is that a free e-mail service requires its own mail servers to transmit the message. If the strategy is wildly successful, mail servers must be added very quickly or the rapid growth will bog down and die. If the virus multiplies only to kill the host before spreading, nothing is accomplished. So long as you have planned ahead of time how you can add mail servers rapidly you're okay. You must build in salability to your viral model.
4. Exploits common consumer motivations and behaviors - Clever viral marketing plans take advantage of common human motivations. The desire to be cool. Greed drives people. So does the hunger to be popular, loved, and understood. The resulting urge to communicate produces millions of web sites and billions of e-mail messages. Design a marketing strategy that builds on common motivations and behaviors for its transmission.
5. Utilizes existing communication networks - Social scientists tell us that each person has a close network of 8 to 12 people. A person's broader network may consist of scores, hundreds, or thousands of people, depending upon their position in society. Affiliate programs and e-mail lists exploit such networks. Learn to place your message into existing communications between people, and this will rapidly multiply its dispersion.
6. Takes advantage of others' resources - The most creative viral marketing plans use others' resources to get the word out. Affiliate programs, for example, place text or graphic links on others' web sites. Authors who give away free articles, seek to position their articles on others' blog or web pages. A news release can be picked up by hundreds of periodicals and form the basis of articles seen by hundreds of thousands of readers. Now someone else's newsprint or web page is relaying your marketing message. Someone else's resources are depleted rather than your own.
   

This is a very powerful tool that is part of a larger inbound marketing strategy and if done right can help you and your company grow by leaps and bounds. Get started today and learn how I Business Lab can help you in your next viral marketing campaign.