Viral Marketing by email

Matt talks about a new marketing report from the ThinData Newsletter.
The Newsletter offers the following recommendations on using viral marketing as part of your next email campaign.

1. State Your Purpose. Be very clear about your intentions with your viral program and about what you plan to do with the email addresses that you will be collecting.
2. Respect Personal Information. Keep in-mind that the addresses you collect are not subscribers until they choose to subscribe themselves. To comply with the rules set out by Canada’s privacy legislation (PIPEDA) you should not retain this information or assume you can send any follow-up emails to them.
3. Clearly Identify Yourself to Referrals. When you send a triggered message to the email addresses entered by the original referral source, use your email address as the from address address as opposed to the referral source’s email address (see example below). In this way, you are demonstrating that you respect the referral source’s email identity.
4. Reduce Risks of Abuse. Use a CAPTCHA in the form that collects the email addresses. A CAPTCHA – which is short for “Completely Automated Public Turing Test to Tell Computers and Humans Apart” – helps to dramatically reduce the potential abuse that spammers can inflict on you or on the owners of the emails you have captured.
5. Answer the Question: What’s In It For Me? Go beyond sending the referred friend a link. Rather, describe concisely why they are receiving the email and the value of taking action.