Businesses planning to implement viral marketing programs must carefully consider the outcomes and any possible problems that may arise particularly if using emails. Viral marketing should be part of any comprehensive marketing strategy – but only one part. The following issues need to be considered when planning any email viral marketing campaign.

Viral Marketing and Growth: Are you ready for a sudden surge in growth. More importantly, are your servers ready for a sudden surge in traffic. Many sites that have a front page Digg hit also suddenly find their sites suspended by the hosts due to heavy traffic. All your social marketing efforts will be lost if your prospective clients cannot access your web pages.

Viral Marketing and Loss of Control: Your messages may end up with individuals outside your target audience. Even worse, individuals may alter the message or add something to it. This may have a negative effect on all your prior branding and marketing efforts.

Viral Marketing and the Spam Claim: Following on from the previous point, if your message has been changed and continues to travel in the desired viral manner, you will be spreading undesired information. Many recipients will view the contents as spam and that will be associated with you and your brand. This may then require a reputation management campaign to undo the damage.

Viral Marketing and Analytics: You cannot always track who has received your email and what action they took. Have they acted because of the campaign or through other forms of marketing (eg, word of mouth). Analytics cannot always determine the source of your traffic so viral marketing can be difficult to track and measure.

Viral marketing can be very effective. Using emails as a viral marketing tool can also be quite effective. Just be aware of some of the ramifications of a viral email campaign.

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This entry was posted on Sunday, March 16th, 2008 at 7:41 am and is filed under Analytics, Branding and Marketing, E-mail Marketing, Reputation Management, Social Marketing, Viral Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.