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The media has focused recently more on Viral marketing, or "refer-a-friend" email campaigns. These campaigns are making more active the recipients of promotional emails to forward the messages to their companions. They were garnering both positive and negative comments from customers, privacy advocates, and industry pundits.

The main issue are the inquiries over sending unsolicited email. But marketers could avoid negative responses by utilizing viral marketing tactics more carefully and in return they would gain much more from their investment (ROI) as they develop the reach of a marketing message to a targeted group far beyond their initial audience.

You can find below five suggestions on how to execute a viral marketing campaign most effectively.

1. Offer an incentive. Viral marketing operates better when a valuable and tangible incentive is offered by encouraging individuals to forward an email message to their companions.

In order to prevent spam-like distribution of the message marketers should cap the incentive to a certain amount. For example: they offer an incentive of 20 percent off referrers' next purchase if they forward the message to 5 friends. Open-ended incentives could cause to a marketer both customer service and privacy-related problems, even financial if providing a $5 credit for each five friends referred.

2. Do not take a referral as an opt-in. The referral shouldn't be considered an opt-in when a customer refers a friend. A name and email address volunteered by a person's friend is not the solution for establishing an opt-in by the person. The information has to be deleted immediately and the referral email will be delivered. If the person wants to receive future mailings, it is better to include a verbiage in the referral e-mail requesting and that should allow the person to opt-in if she wants to.

3. You must customize the referral email. It's recommended to personalize the email message in order to show that it's coming from a recognizable source otherwise the response rates can increase dramatically when users see that a message is coming from a friend. The subject line is the most important component in a viral marketing email as it can be identified as a friendly email.

4. Analyzing and tracking your campaigns results. A good marketing tactics' is to track the results and to make the best use of performance over the time, which is critically. Nowadays, sophisticated email marketers can observe insightful and actionable data that can be used for reviewing performance. The metrics to be examined are pass-along, click-through, and conversion rates. A marketer should differentiate the click-through and conversion rates by initial customers from referrals and evaluate their respective performances. The use of these metrics is to alert a marketer to which offers and individuals drive the utmost ROI.

5. Always promote favorable referrals. Marketers should always place a viral marketing offer in every important outgoing email message if they want to have their messages frequently forwarded. Viral marketing is good for a one-time campaign, but it could be much more as a very compelling utility for continuing to enhance the connection of your marketing messages over time.

As it doesn't exist a sure-fire approach to keep away the unpleasant customer responses, by following these 5 concepts, marketers should discover their viral marketing campaigns to be most compelling.