Opt-in and viral marketing instead of spamming

E-mail marketing can bring success, but it can also cost a good reputation - by 2004, some 200 billion advertising e-mails are expected to be sent in the USABy Clemens Hörler Spamming is a taboo for many companies. They therefore limit e-mail marketing to maintaining existing customer relationships with opt-in e-mails. But there are also ways to acquire new customers without spamming.
Mass mailing of advertising e-mails is inexpensive, but it can backfire. Although there are still no laws in Switzerland that regulate the sending of advertising e-mails, angry recipients can take revenge on the sender by bombarding him with e-mails.
What is even more serious: The sender can damage his reputation with aimless spamming. Surveys show that around 90 percent of users have a negative attitude toward mass mailings.
Marketing experts therefore recommend that companies use this tool cautiously, for example in the form of opt-in marketing: Internet users give their express consent to be informed about new offers. Although this is not a way to attract new customers, it does help to retain existing customers. According to Forrester Research, an average of four percent of recipients of opt-in e-mails buy the advertised product.
Email from a friend is more credible than advertising
An elegant method of attracting new customers is also viral marketing: you let your advertising message spread like a rumor. Many companies provide ready-made forms with which the visitor can recommend the website to friends.
"Virus marketing, like the rumor, is a primal form of communication," believes Stéphane Périno of Geneva-based Agence Virtuelle. The big advantage, he says, is that a friend often has greater credibility as an advertising ambassador than the company itself.
Predestined for virus marketing are websites with services where the internaut benefits if as many of his colleagues as possible use the same offer, for example, co-shopping platforms on which prices fall as the number of buyers increases. However, many companies are unable to offer such services and try to arouse the internauts' propaganda enthusiasm with rewards. For example, the recruitment agency Topjobs Net AG raffled off ten digital cameras among Internet users who recommended the job platform Jobworld.ch in February or March.
18800 donkeys hoped
on ten cell phones
One of the most successful virus campaigns in Switzerland was carried out by Ericsson Schweiz AG at the end of 1998. It had asked Advico Young & Rubicam and FutureCom Interactive to promote a Christmas campaign via the handy.ch website. The solution consisted of an online game in which participants had to have a virtual donkey loaded with as many packages as possible by their acquaintances. Ten cell phone packages were raffled among the successful donkey owners and loaders.
The donkey owners therefore tried to involve as many acquaintances as possible in the game and diligently sent out mails to recruit new pack loaders. The result: In four weeks, 74453 internauts loaded 18800 donkeys. Ericsson sold more Christmas packages than budgeted.
Of course, viral marketing is no guarantee of success, especially if internauts are to be enticed to send out prefabricated forms en masse. If the internaut thinks more about his own profit than about the benefit for his acquaintances, he also loses credibility as an advertising ambassador.
Email marketing statistics

At the end of 1999, there were 569 million e-mail accounts worldwide, 83 percent more than the previous year. This was the result of a study by Messaging Online. By 2002, the number of e-mail accounts is expected to have grown to one billion, according to Messaging Online.
In the USA, around 200 billion advertising e-mails are expected to be sent per year by 2004. That would be equivalent to about three e-mails per day per resident of the USA. According to a study by Forrester Research Inc. (www.forrester.com), American companies plan to spend 4.8 billion dollars on e-mail marketing in four years. 3.2 billion will be spent on maintaining existing customers. The Forrester study "The Email Marketing Dialogue" also states that companies that have outsourced their electronic marketing activities to specialized companies currently achieve four times higher purchase rates than companies that handle email marketing in-house.
A study by Jupiter Communications (www.jup.com) shows that 5 to 15 percent of Internet users who learn about a website via virus marketing actually visit it. (ch)