The word viral has many bad connotations. It conjures up thoughts of corrupted hard drives and viral infections. In fact, if ‘a viral’ was some sort of person or clan, there’d be trouble to pay. The very word sounds vile and disturbingly suspicious, such as the mention of Cockroaches for example. Yet, just like these pesky fellows viral components have benefits. Even though cockroaches are considered disgusting and ‘vile’ they are a delicacy in many cultures, and have proven to have great nutritional value, like beef, chicken or shrimp. As for adding a viral component to an email marketing campaign? Even though the term viral marketing seems somewhat dodgy, it can boost response rates.

Viral marketing is simply defined as getting recipients to do your marketing for you, by forwarding your message to their friends and associates. This can allow for exponential growth in the number of people who are exposed to your email marketing campaign. Although Viral component can also create some major problems, there are ways to run a smart, headache-free campaign, in order for you to avoid pessimistic reactions and gain an excellent return on investment, as your subscribers help you reach a targeted group far past your intended audience.

In which ways can viral components benefit your email marketing campaign?

Creating a viral email marketing campaign is technically tricky. It also requires some sound understanding of marketing and advertising principles in order for it to be successful. A classic example of highly effective viral marketing is, Hotmail. Hotmail has been able to use their own service (free email) to convince other people to signup for the service by getting people to use the service itself. They’ve achieved this by appending a simple but effective advertisement (“Get your own free Hotmail email address”) to the bottom of every message they send. By making the very act of using the service spread the word, Hotmail has become one of the most successful examples of viral marketing to date.

Grow your opt-in list

Convince users to forward your email, with a sign-up offer. This will encourage new signups and possible even match those signups to the readers who did the original forwarding.
Increase your brand exposure

To start your process of giving your brand exposure, encourage users to forward your email/s. This will help your brand go farther and give constant and greater exposure.
Drive website traffic

The more people who receive your email, the more people will see and click on the link that takes them to your website where they can be exposed to product information, cross-selling, sign-up offers, etc.
Design loyalty programs

Viral email tracking systems can help you acknowledge or reward those special people who help you grow your business. This will stand you in good stead especially as far as future campaigns are concerned.
Generate revenue from advertising

If users forward your email that contains an ad, more people see or click on the ad. These can translate directly into revenue.
Generate revenue directly from the email
If your email contains a "buy now" button, you can directly correlate forwarding to revenues. The more your email is forwarded, the more likely you are to increase revenues beyond the original list's potential.

Keep in mind; it is possible to measure the extent to which an email message travels among people, and its effectiveness among new generations of recipients. Sophisticated email marketing software solutions enable you to embed customized "forward to a friend" and "subscribe now" links within an email campaign, and thus track the number of times the email is forwarded and whether that referral resulted in a new subscriber to the list.
The term is called "viralocity" (taken from "viral" and "velocity") which describes the rate and speed at which an email is forwarded from person to person. It is becoming increasingly apparent that viral email marketing works. Almost every campaign can gain greater exposure by making it easy for recipients to do part of the marketing for you. For example, an email sent to a contact list of only 20 people could potentially end up in the inboxes of hundreds, thousands, or even millions of users. Simply apply a few viral techniques and allow this powerful online marketing formula to rocket your email campaign to new lucrative height.