| Do the Math: Taking Email Viral with Social Networking |
 I was surprised by a recent eMarketer study that showed only six percent of email marketing campaigns provide the option for recipients to share messages with their social networks.
The State of Email Sharing - Percent of Online Retailers Source: Smith-Harmon (2009, August 6). US Online Retailers with Select Sharing Options in Their E-Mail Campaigns. eMarketer, August 2009. Remember the term, "viral marketing"? It was originally coined by Tim Draper, founder of the global venture capital firm Draper Fisher Jurvetson, who came up with the concept of using Web-based email marketing to exponentially spread an Internet product by online word of mouth. The concept contributed to the original success of Hotmail and Yahoo! Mail, which, if you can remember that far back, predated the era of online social networks. The benefits were obvious to marketers. They could send an e-mail message to their list, which recipients would potentially forward to their own lists, aka "social networks". No additional investment was required on the part of marketers, and the message itself was perceived as having more value simply because it was recommended by the person who forwarded it. The only downside: difficulty with measurement and tracking. Fast forward to the era of online marketing measurement and accountability. Email and online social networks have become the ultimate viral marketing tool. Today, email marketers can track and measure their campaigns, including how they are spread through social networks like Facebook, LinkedIn and MySpace and which conversions are achieved via those networks. Say you’re a marketer who sends an email to 60,000 contacts that includes the ability to click on an icon to immediately post the message to a social networking page. If just 170 contacts post your message on their Facebook page, and they each have an average of 30 friends and colleagues in their network, that message can now be seen by potentially another 5,100 contacts. If just 10 percent of those contacts respond to the offer (remember, it’s being recommended by a friend), you can achieve another 510 conversions with zero additional investment. Who can argue with numbers like these? Or are there downsides to this strategy that outweigh the apparent benefits? Use the ‘Comments’ section below to let us know what your experience has been, or other viral marketing techniques you’ve used to boost email marketing and online marketing conversion rates. ### Related Resources:
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