Viral Marketing: How 10 emails can drive 10 million to a website
I found an article in MarketingSherpa’s website that really worths the time of reading it. You’ll surely enjoy it. “Viral Hall of Fame
The idea appears to be so simple and certainly not original...and a bit tasteless too. But I guess guys & beer & sex will always be a success-guaranteed recipe.
Virtual Bartender was a beautiful blonde beer.com girl ready and waiting to respond to some pretty bizarre requests. Aside from the beautiful model, the fun was in figuring out what she would and wouldn't do. Apparently, people even posted lists of commands that they had tried on the many blogs around the world.
The goal of the campaign was to drive millions of 18 to 26 year old males to beer.com which will, in turn, help establish the site as a vehicle for advertisers trying to reach this target.
But the reason why I’m so thrilled by this campaign is HOW it succeeded. It is one of the best examples of snowball action I’ve ever seen. They did it with seed strategy: JUST 10 EMAILS WERE SENT out to friends of beer.com. No other marketing tool was used and there weren't any links from our home page or any other sites. Its success was purely driven by people forwarding the link to others...
The success of this project was overwhelming! Those 10 simple emails led to 75 sessions later that night, 15,000 the following day and then began to double, then triple. Beer.com became the most popular website in the world for the month of November 2004 and achieved more than 800% growth in traffic with more than 10,000,000 user sessions in only 28 days!!!!!
The power of consumer-to-consumer interaction... apparently this was certainly a story to tell!
http://www.beer.com/beer.com-Content_C-section_id-1126642896690_vb.html
-Lorena Roque
posted by Brand007 @ 10:37 PM
2 Comments:
Hi Lorena!
When we launched Virtual Bartender, we honestly didn't know how well it was going to do. As you suggest, guys + girls + beer = sure thing, but people we spoke to about it all kinda just laughed initially. The night we launched it, it literally had 75 views that night (from 9:00PM to midnight), 15,000 the next day, then 30,000 and on into the hundreds of thousands and then millions by the 4th or 5th day. I can honestly tell you that there is nothing more exciting than seeing that kind of snowball reaction. It's addictive! Thanks very much for writing about it on your blog!
Rick Brown
Editor in Chief
Beer.com
Hi Rick!
I'm really excited that you took the time to read and comment on my blog...thank you so much!
I was really impressed when I read about Virtual Bartender; I can understand some people were a bit skeptical at first because the idea didn't sound especially innovative... but the way you launched it and how it spread all over the world that fast is just amazing!
There is one thing I am really curious about, and I would like to ask you. Obviously, those "10 friends" of beer.com that you selected for the emails were key to spread the buzz so fast. What criteria did you follow to choose them?
-Lorena Roque
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