Email is a great tool to promote your viral marketing campaigns and if used correctly has the ability to exponentially grow your website traffic and potentially business, writes Andrew Azorbo.

Email has been getting a lot of bad press due to bad practices and SPAM. This makes viral marketing even more useful as the endorsed nature of it caused by friends sending to each other bypasses the usual negative associations with email.

In order to tap into this for your email viral marketing, here are a few tips.

Target market

Define your target market and make sure you are in tune with their tastes and dislikes. Your viral campaigns, copy, look and feel needs to be in tune with their tastes and appeal to them. Really get into their heads so you know what makes them tick and what current events, news or other developments happening now would be of interest.

Incentive

Once you’ve defined your market you’ll have a better idea of what kinds of incentives or content would motivate them to pass the email on to their friends, colleagues or other members in their community.

Identify core or power users

To maximize your viral marketing efforts and also give it more credibility, having it trickle down from the respected or power users of a community with the capability to reach huge numbers in a short period can really help boost your viral marketing efforts.

You’ll need to find these advocates and core users and have compelling enough content that makes it worth their while to spread.

Additional email list sources

In addition to identifying the core users, here are some other channels you can use to communicate your viral marketing content to.

In-house list: even small lists will do, you can actually grow your list as your current users encourage others to join.

Rented and purchased lists: use lists that fit your target audience and power users.

Discussion lists/groups: announce your viral content to discussion lists and groups that would genuinely find these interesting.

Other people's email lists

Affiliate partnerships: if you have affiliates in your network then leverage these and their lists.

Comparative industries: find related industries, companies and services that are not direct competitors, perhaps you can work on a simple joint venture with incentives that benefit both? Don’t be shy in offering incentives to them and making worthwhile.

Technical issues

In addition to spreading your message you’ll need to look into any technical issues that might cause emails not to be readable or formatted correctly.

Test this first to make sure everything works fine.

Check your email doesn’t raise any SPAM filtering flags, there are a number of solutions on the web that scan your emails and flag anything that could potentially be caught by SPAM filters.

Copy

This goes back to knowing your target market. The copy you use will be very important to ensure the emails get opened and that the specific action is taken, i.e. link clicked, email forwarded or what ever your end goals are.

Be specific in the call to action and ensure the first action is very simple as you can add steps later down the line.

About the author

Andrew Azorbo works for AzACreations, who have written a free paper on the Top 10 Viral Marketing Mistakes That Could Sink Your Campaign & How To Set Yourself Up For Viral Marketing Success: here.