Pro and Cons of using viral email marketing

Focus!

Pros

Viral Email Marketing lower costs and can increases profits related to business campaign. According to the above post case, email is FAST, personal, interactive and extremely effective in a short term. The viral effect spread quickly and the incentives encourage consumers to act.

Reduce Marketing Costs

Email marketing provides cost-saving benefits, such as:

No printing, mailing or media expenses
Response rate higher compare with direct mail or banner ads

Retention

Allows frequent customer contact, which translates into higher revenues. Customer acquisition costs average only $24 for email versus $82 for PR, $958 for print ads, and $1,457 for radio ads. (Source: Fiore & Collins)

Viral email marketing is a great way to promote and market your goods. However, you’ll have to make the campaign as innovative as possible if you want positive results.

Track the resultNumber of response and clicks that can check by statistics.

Cons

Although viral email marketing is fast to spread information, there are some problems. Here is the main issue:
Deliverability
According to some report, legitimate email servers averaged a delivery rate of 56%; twenty percent of the messages were rejected, and eight percent were filtered. An email marketing program must make sure that their program does not violate spam.

Privacy

Before send an email to consumer, company should ask for permission that they allow to receiving your company email. Provide opt-in and opt-out service for receivers.

Fan email fire with social forwarding!

Real successful case of applying viral email marketing -

Papa John's Pizza -Pass the Pie

Research shows that consumers are more inclined to open an email from a friend than from a company. Believe that? It’s real. Papa John’s who added 45,000 fans on Facebook just in three days after their viral marketing email campaign. Papa John’s send the email to subscribers, enable them to share special offer to friends and chance to win Pizza for a year. It is a great deal to pass along to through email and social network (Facebook, Twitter)

Through email and social network, what things motivate receivers to pass along the mail and information?
Here are three factors:
1: Incentives

2: Valuable to themselves
3: Trust (friends/peers effect)

You’ve got Mail!
Papa John’s Pizza encourages customer to opt-in email and SMS to receive information and offers. The most commonly used online service in most countries is email. Papa John’s Pizza succeeds by applying e-marketing for business.

Viral marketing – via email

Viral E-mail Marketing

This article is about viral emails, (also known as a "pass-along email") is a certain kind of email which spread rapidly from person to person. It’s like viruses via emails to infect readers. The contents can include texts, videos, links etc. that related to a company’s business campaign. And try to motivate receiver to take an action by incentives.

The process is relatively simple, an individual receives an email and the contents have value add to them or friends, ultimately receiver would forward the email to their friends. 

The pass-along process repeat and repeat, people do the same, and thus they rapidly spread the email, in a worldwide proportion.

A common commercial application for viral email marketing is the viral advertising campaigns or promotional emails. Receivers take action to forward the email is base on the contents is valuable to themselves.