Viral Email Marketing
Creating a Successful Campaign

To be honest, most attempts at viral email marketing are not successful. Viruses are easier to spread than they are to create, whether or not you are talking about a real one. While there is no way to guarantee your success, here are some guidelines to follow that should improve your chances with your email campaign.

Find a Niche, Don’t Buy a List

Some of the least successful e-mail campaigns are those in which people buy lists of e-mail addresses from companies that sell them. A great many of your "sent" e-mails will end up being caught by a spam filter. These days, nobody likes spam. When someone receives an unsolicited e-mail, they will usually delete or mark it as spam.

Your resources for "good" e-mail lists are established online companies that "rent" their lists. They have worked hard to create them. They won’t sell them to you. They might not even allow you to have the addresses. But, they will make an "offer" to their customers.

"Would you like to receive offers from our partner companies?" That’s a commonly used phrase that allows their customers to "opt-in" to receiving your e-mails.

To be successful at viral email marketing in this way, you need to identify partners that have similar niches. For example, if you want to sell vitamin supplements, you might partner up with an established health and fitness company.

Offer Something Valuable for Free

Everyone loves something free. The easiest thing to give away on the internet is information. Information can be very valuable.

You are an expert in something. It could be the use of power tools or the care of an infant. If you first identify your niche market (find people that are interested in power tools), then tailor your information to appeal to your niche and you are always sure that your information is exciting and valuable, your success is practically guaranteed.

Here’s how a successful viral email marketing campaign works. You send an e-mail to Mary. Mary is excited and thinks that her friends will be excited, too. She forwards the e-mail to 12 of her closest friends.

Ten of them find the information exciting and valuable, as well. They forward it to 10 of their friends. With one e-mail, you have just reached 100 people. The number can grow exponentially, spreading like a virus.

Include your viral email marketing campaign in your internet business model. If you don’t succeed at first, try again. If you ask around, you will find that people who are successful, have failed a few times when they started.