subject: How To Grow A List With Viral Marketing [print this page] It cannot be denied that viral marketing have many potentials especially in the marketing business. But how can you use viral marketing to grow your list?
If you have been in this kind of business already, you would already know that viral marketing is a great way to get the word out about your product or service. When this happens, you can expect a huge surge in sales.
But what about subscriptions to your newsletter? Can they too be affected by this type of marketing?
Of course, they can.
It will all depend on how difficult and successful you want to make it. Not that these two factors necessarily go hand in hand.
The most basic form of using viral marketing automatically is probably a tell-a-friend script. You have seen them and you probably used them as well, either knowingly or unknowingly.
All you have to do is type in someone's email address into a form, and the website will usually have text pre-inserted into the form telling the person how great you think the website is. You also have an option. You could always add your own text instead.
Your friend receives an email which to them looks like you are telling them about this fantastic new website and hopefully he will sign up to the newsletter to find out more.
This can be manipulated in other ways.
For example what if you did a questionnaire. To get the results of the questionnaire, not only does the person have to sign up to your newsletter, but they have to fill out a tell-a-friend script for three friends, telling them about this questionnaire.
Then when those three friends sign up and take the questionnaire, they will then see that they have to sign up to the newsletter to find out the results. As always, they need to tell three more friends each.
In case you have not noticed, this has a huge snowball effect and should see you exponentially growing your opt-in mailing list in no time at all.
This is not too hard to create either. You could always ask some expert programmers how much he would charge for such a thing.
However, you must remember that you must start your marketing efforts with some fuel, and that fuel is people.
You have to start with at least a few people filling out the questionnaires for this to even begin. A simple mathematical equation: 0 people telling 3 friends each still equals 0.
Another way to grow your mailing list is to pay people for every subscriber they send your way.
This is not exactly the type of marketing. This is not exactly the type of marketing many are tutoring about but it will grow your opt-in list quite well if you pay enough and find enough people to do it.
For example, 10 cents per subscriber is fair enough. If people would gather in bulks, then that small amount would multiply and accumulate to higher percentage.
If people start sending you more subscribers than you can afford to pay, then you can always put it on hold for a while.
But remember that if you treat your subscribers well, then you have a life time value of them. The profits you will be getting from lifetime loyal customers are worth far more than the 10 cents you have shed in the initial start.
Hotmail.com used this form of marketing in a small way that produced big results. At the bottom of each of the emails sent, they included a small line that said something like "Get your free email account with hotmail.com".
This meant that every time an email was sent from hotmail the recipient would read this and perhaps consider the offer of a free account and think that this is worth checking out.
This resulted in Hotmail's huge growth in a relatively short period of time. But then Microsoft eventually brought Hotmail.com for an obscene amount of money.
The example above is what happens to viral marketing when the lists are made effective. With the proper style and the proper viral marketing applied, you too can grow that list and achieve the high profits many have already attained.
