Marketing Essentials 2012

Chapter 13: Beginning the Sales Process

eMarketing Feature

Viral and Affiliate Marketing
Viral e-marketing is a technique that e-marketers use to connect with new potential customers via current customers. For example, you may send an e-mail to your friends and at the bottom of the e-mail an advertiser includes a tagline that invites them to try out your e-mail service. If each friend responds positively to the tagline, a lot more customers may be generated. All responders that join may repeat the process and thereby "recruit" new customers for the e-mail provider. Hot Mail had success with this technique in India where it became the leading e-mail service without doing much of anything else. Another way of generating leads is through affiliate marketing, whereby one Web site will send viewers to another Web site. The affiliates (ones directly traffic to other Web sites) are rewarded by the business getting the referrals, which are potential customers.

Innovate and Create
Compare viral and affiliate e-marketing with prospecting using the endless chain method (customer referrals) and cold canvassing. Explain how a blog service provider could generate customer leads for itself and other companies. Write a catchy tagline to generate new leads for a Blog service to demonstrate the viral e-marketing technique.