Getting recipients of your viral advertising e-mail to forward it to their friends and coworkers isn’t as hard as it sounds. The whole trick is to make them WANT to share it and thereby share your advertisement. Neat! Cool! Free!

Because entertainment has value, interactive content like a quiz or test can inspire forwarding, especially if it’s fun. Personality tests, fitness quizzes, or compatibility questionnaires are all things that I have received and sent at one time or another.

A really cool, multimedia experience is always going to achieve some pass-along action. Rich media email is getting a lot of press of late. Someone is always touting the benefits. It does take more time and a little money but the messages have great appeal. Rich media has the advantage of being new and therefore has the novelty and tech factor. That alone is often enough for the message to be seen as valuable and worth forwarding.

There are vendors like RidicalMail and AdTools that have “Forward to a Friend” capabilities built right into their technology. Right now this works but eventually marketers will still rely on the value of the proposition in their message to be enough to distinguish it from the rest.

So should you try to capitalize on viral marketing? Absolutely! You would be a fool not to include things in your e-mail advertising campaign that would inspire forwarding. You should certainly try to reap the benefits of reaching more than your target audience.

You need to stretch those advertising dollars so hard you make George cry. You do, however, need to understand that viral marketing is a tactic that works toward achieving your campaign objective.

Oh…one more thing. No matter how brilliant you craft the offer and no matter how great the message, if the customer visits your site and has an experience less than what was promised, it will come back to bite you.

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Concerns over sending unsolicited email is at the heart of the legality issue of using viral advertising. By using viral marketing tactics carefully, however, marketers can avoid the negative reactions and gain an excellent return on investment (ROI) t as they increase the reach of their marketing message to a targeted group far beyond their original audience.

Here are a few insights on how to execute a viral marketing campaign most effectively.

• Offer an incentive. Viral marketing works best when a valuable and tangible incentive is offered that will encourage people to forward an e-mail message to their friends. Marketers should, however, cap the incentive to a specific quantity to avoid spam-like distribution of the message.

• Do not consider the referral an opt-in. When a customer refers a friend, the referral shouldn’t be considered an opt-in. A name and e-mail address given by a person’s friend does not constitute an opt-in by the individual, so the data should be deleted immediately after the referral email is sent. The referral email should provide the recipient with the option to opt out if he or she does not want to receive future mailings.

• Personalize the referral e-mail. Response rates increase dramatically when users can see that a message is coming from a friend, so it is always best to personalize the e-mail message to show that it is coming from a recognizable source. The subject line is the key component in a viral marketing e-mail because it can immediately identify the e-mail as friendly. A good subject line might read, “FYI: Jane Doe thought you’d like 20% off at ABC.com.”

• Continually promote friendly referrals. Marketers who would like to have their messages forwarded frequently should place a viral marketing offer in every relevant outgoing e-mail message.

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