Intended Audience:  Communications Managers, public relations officers, marketing personnel and business owners.
E-marketing Synonyms: Online marketing, web marketing.

Viral Marketing

Viral marketing is the concept of turning each customer into a marketer, for your business, by encouraging word-of-mouth referrals. Bring this into the context of the web and we see so many potential areas where this can be applied.

To start you could have a simple “Mail this article to a friend” function whereby the user elects to enter another person’s e-mail address to have the web page link or the entire article sent to them via e-mail. You should consider the privacy concerns here and not get into the practice of storing those e-mail addresses for later use in e-mail marketing campaigns.

Sending out a brainteaser e-mail which can be passed around among social groups from one user to the next is another possibility. The e-mails could have links to your website for users to check their answers.

A well conceived online viral marketing campaign can produce fantastic results if the content appeals to large audiences with social networking potential and tendencies.

That concludes this series on the different forms of e-marketing that are in use today.

Part 1 - Delivery, or Package types, Affiliate Advertising, Auto Responder Marketing
Part 2 - Behavioral Advertising, Bloggin, Customer Relationship Management
Part 3 - Padcasting, Really Simply Syndication (RSS), Rich Media Advertising
Part 4 - Search Engine Advertising (a.k.a. Search Engine Marketing), Search Engine Optimization
Part 5 - Viral Marketing