Monday, August 14, 2006

E-mail a Powerful Link Between Marketers and Influencers

eMarkewter: E-mail is everywhere. Regularly employed by 90% of US Internet users and 56% of the total population, the power of e-mail derives from its ubiquity. E-mail represents an audience with critical mass, and it is the primary delivery vehicle for word-of-mouth marketing.

The purpose of e-mail is to enhance a company's relationship with its customers and to draw in new prospects. A marketer's ability to join the conversation among consumers, by using e-mail, is crucial for blending marketing into today's world of consumer-generated content such as blogs, social networks, video and related media.

Techniques that marketers have found effective in combining e-mail and word-of-mouth marketing include providing incentives to encourage that the e-mail is passed along to friends, and sending e-mail only to consumers who have opted in to receive it.

Sometimes that encouragement comes from entertainment, such as an edgy commercial that is passed along because it is humorous or cool, writes . One recent example is Procter & Gamble, which distributed a viral video clip for its Folgers coffee with lines like You can sleep when you're dead.

But the dark side for marketers is that consumers may take a company-made viral video and make a parody of it, as they did with the Folgers video. No problem. Humor, even when brand parody, is much like the famous axiom for public relations, where the only bad press is no press, he writes. bility?

, E-Mail and Word-of-Mouth: Connect With Your Best Customers Publ 20060814