No matter what methods you use to start a campaign, the following insights can help you maintain control and are ways to be certain that the message your campaign is sending is the one that you wish to send. Using methods like these to steer your campaign and keep it on track are just as vital to successful campaigns, as is following up with existing members/customers in a regular and valued manner to ensure you have neither lost their interest nor inadvertently annoyed them.
 Offer incentives in exchange for traceable actions that help positively promote your campaign. For instance, offering twenty percent discounts for every five leads that followed a link from their web site to your home page. Be sure to cap and clearly detail such offerings so that you do not cripple yourself or spend too much for the value received!
Utilize public sympathy whenever possible. The classic e-mail hoax about the bottle caps and the little boy in England is a clear example of how drawing on people's desire to help others can propel a campaign into a near unstoppable juggernaut. Just make sure you use such power wisely!
An example of a successful method of cashing in on such feelings came recently when a woman's clothing company started a campaign that rewarded participating members with a free Tee-shirt and a $1 donation to the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation when three of their friends opted into receive the retailers catalog or join the e-mail list. This campaign was enormously successful in large part due to the feeling that simply by participating in receiving offerings they could help others less fortunate then themselves.
That particular campaign drove a click-through rating more then three times higher then was normal on the company's web site links and an increase in the sign-up rate for their e-mail newsletter list of over thirty percent! At the same time their catalog subscription rate went up nearly seventy percent with little risk of "dead" deliveries since the people opting in to receive the catalogs were women and interested enough to choose the catalog over e-mail contacts.
All of this free publicity also helped to lower the costs per sale during the campaign by as much as eight-nine percent! By anyone's considerations that is a successful campaign!
Be Personal and keep it real. Just as not automatically considering having someone's e-mail address as free reign to send them advertisements is a good policy, is finding ways to personalize your contacts. This ensures that the customer or would-be customer feels that you are really reaching out to them and not just to a potential sale.
Simply by using mail-merge features to insert names when available and using your records to focus offerings to the types of items shown to be of interest to the individuals, you can increase response by as much as twenty to thirty percent! In most cases the subject line is one of the most important aspects of this skill.
Simply being able to recognize if something is junk mail or an offering that might be worth pursuing, will go a long way toward avoiding annoyance even if the user isn't interested. If you DO use mail merge take the time to learn how to use "IF" fields and proper formatting using styles in your coding however. Nothing ruins the personalization of seeing your name in print as seeing clues such as it being in a different font or seeing "{firstname}" when a little extra effort up front can prevent that!
Keep track of your campaign results and user details. Updating and optimizing a campaign and changing offerings to individual users based on their purchases and feedback, is not only good marketing sense, it is vital to the care and feeding of a successful viral marketing campaign. Tracking click-through and conversion rates based on your original customers is just one of the ways you can accomplish this, and having a good database is vital to maintaining and utilizing such data.
Although you can't avoid all negative feelings on the part of some contacts, these tips should help you minimize the number of users who actively campaign against your viral marketing scheme. Plus, they should keep your e-mails from falling into the dreaded "junk e-mail" folders and thus wasting all the efforts you might be taking to get both that person and those they might refer you to as customers.
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