Unlike typical email refer-a-friend links that only allow forwarding of generic email content to a few email addresses, referrers use the JumpReach contact importer to access their address books and send unlimited personalized invite emails with the marketer’s specific promotion or offering. JumpReach’s administration portal allows marketers to manage their campaigns, track referrals and recipients’ actions and export reports. 

WOMMA, the Word-of-Mouth Marketing Association, recently used JumpReach Basic to promote an educational webinar for their membership. 

"As an organization, spreading WOM and empowering individuals to share our content is integrated into our daily engagement efforts, said Steve Ziemba, Social Media Director at WOMMA. “JumpReach Basic enabled us to quickly and easily create a referral campaign specifically for our recent webinar, our existing marketing efforts, and in our emails and website.” Ziemba added, “With JumpReach Basic’s analytics, we could see the real-time results of the campaign and how many referrals it generated.”

JumpReach Basic links or “share buttons” work with existing email marketing programs, websites and advertising campaigns. Using JumpReach’s campaign wizard, marketers can create the content for their offering and a campaign landing page without any coding. JumpReach manages secure, CAN-SPAM compliant sending of emails.

See JumpReach in action at www.jumpreach.com/share, where you can earn a free month of service by referring your friends.

About JumpReach

Headquartered in Washington, D.C., JumpReach, LLC is a provider of interactive social media marketing solutions for online marketers. The company’s primary product, JumpReach™

online viral marketing campaign service, leverages a business’s biggest asset – its own, existing audience. By giving current audiences the ability to share specific information or offers with their social networks, marketers can more effectively drive traffic to their websites and generate new leads. JumpReach campaigns work with existing email marketing systems and websites and provide real-time measurements of campaign performance. JumpReach is a wholly owned subsidiary of EyeTraffic Media, LLC. For more information, visit www.jumpreach.com.

About EyeTraffic Media

Headquartered in Washington, D.C., EyeTraffic Media is a performance-driven interactive marketing consulting firm that provides unsurpassed campaign management solutions for companies and organizations seeking to more effectively connect with their target audiences. EyeTraffic boosts lead generation and customer acquisition by leveraging our expertise in search engine marketing, online media buying, email and social media, mobile marketing and web analytics. Acting as a seamless extension of your marketing team, we build, manage, track and analyze interactive marketing campaigns and programs that generate measurable results. For more information, go to www.eyetraffic.com.

Retailers have been using email marketing for quite some time now to keep their existing customers informed and hopefully attract new customers. Now more and more retailers are adding "share" or "forward to a friend" options to their emails, hoping that their existing subscribers will help them bring in new ones.

Retailers have been using to two different techniques to encourage word of mouth marketing. The first is adding a "forward to a friend" (FTAF) button, which according to data from Smith Harmon, has been adopted by 41% of retailers surveyed. The other option, which is less popular right now, is adding a "share with your social network" (SWYN) option. Of those surveyed, only 6% said they provide this option. The study also showed that 7% of retailers offered both options while 46% offered neither option.

FTAF is clearly the more popular option right now, but many people believe that SWYN is on the rise. Within SWYN there are several different social networks that retailers make available. As seen in the chart below, the most popular one by far is Facebook.

Adding these functions to your emails is a tremendous idea and is something that should be done by all companies and organizations, not just retailers. When finding either a forward to a friend or a share with your social network tool to incorporate with your email newsletters, there are several different options out there including our own tool, JumpReach. Our solution provides robust analytics that allow you to see the detailed results of your sharing campaign and it also makes it easy for your existing subscribers to forward your message by allowing them to access their address book for Gmail, Yahoo, AOL, MSN, Outlook and LinkedIn to select which contacts they want to share with. In conjunction with our JumpReach solution, we offer a FREE Assessment in which one of our Product Specialists will discuss how your business can enjoy the benefits of viral marketing.

| Read Part 1 |

Ask yourself this: When was the last time you bought a product or used a service after hearing about it from a traditional medium like TV commercial or magazine ad? From another perspective, how do you think clients – from the cellular-deprived consumer who dropped a phone in the toilet to the airline looking to upgrade its fleet – make decisions and find out about you? 

With the scales tipping in favor of new and social media, word-of-mouth is more prevalent and influential than ever. Not only is this message powerful because it’s passed efficiently via social media from trusted sources, but also because the amount of time consumers spend on social media continues to increase. For supporting research and data, check out the Nielsen report “Social Networking’s New Global Footprint" (Note: opens as a PDF).

80% of EyeTraffic Media’s new clients come from referrals, which is basically word-of-mouth. How do we accomplish that? By providing effective, measurable results through the implementation of tactical interactive marketing campaigns, including helping our clients use social media in their favor. That statement isn’t to pat ourselves on the back, but notice that nowhere does it say “by using word-of-mouth marketing”. 

We GENERATE word-of-mouth by providing exceptional marketing solutions for clients. That is, our services are remarkable; our past and current clients are compelled to talk about them. That’s how we, a marketing consultancy executing the lion’s share of our tactics through new media, make word-of-mouth work in our favor.

Abandon the mindset of “using” word-of-mouth. Word-of-mouth is an outcome, not a tactic in itself. This type of buzz can be induced by fantastic products, extraordinary service, innovative methods, controversial practices, and a myriad of other reasons people start talking. Of course, word-of-mouth can be negative as well, but don’t let that scare you. From our standpoint, the best marketing advice strangely comes from Bonnie Raitt: give ‘em something (good) to talk about.

In this two-post entry, hopefully you’ve learned a bit about social media. But finding information on social media is like drinking from a fire hydrant. Thankfully, you can continue your social media immersion in t-minus 12 days on July 22 @ 12 EST/ 9 PST when EyeTraffic Media and the Word of Mouth Marketing Association (WOMMA) join forces for a webinar – Measuring Social Media Effectively. This 1-hour session will focus on just that: measuring your social media efforts. In the crowded landscape of social media, it’s easy to join the conversation but difficult to know if all the chatter is adding up. Best of all, the webinar is FREE. Bring your thinking cap, questions, and find out how you can take your social media understanding to a measurable level. Click the badge below to register.

Every so often you’ll come across a Web site or textbook that lists “word-of-mouth” as a tactic in the marketer’s arsenal. At first thought, it doesn’t seem crazy; word-of-mouth marketing is often an important consideration in spreading a company’s message, gaining customer referrals, and building goodwill. 

Word-of-mouth is at the essence of social media. Twitter, Facebook, and the blogosphere are basically hyper-efficient platforms for making word-of-mouth happen. Social media are the striking surface for the match and you’re more likely to start a fire by using them in concert (unless you’re able to get a spark from the sole of a shoe – but I wouldn’t count on that on a desert island). In short, social media have bestowed upon marketers a way to potentially facilitate buzz with the click of a mouse.

But …

Here’s the thing: word-of-mouth marketing is still the “effect” in this casual relationship. All word-of-mouth starts with a noteworthy product/service experience or a piece of wise or salacious information. Now, since it’s unlikely you’re working with the very latter, think about what makes your company, what it provides, or what it says worth telling others about. 

And that’s where the crux exists and we must make a crucial distinction. This means the value your company provides must extend past the person it serves directly. The value must be worth spreading. After all, the spreaders – or as Seth Godin calls them, “sneezers” – are putting their reputations as sages on the line to vouch for you or your company. Ask this: What companies do you trust enough to do that?

That being said, social media have made it both easier and harder for you to give the spreaders a message in the right format and clarity to share it with social networks. For example, a positive experience at Great Clips might not be so easy (or remotely interesting) to express on Facebook. However, if Great Clips set up a Twitter account for the freshly shorn to anonymously tweet about their experiences or take an in-salon satisfaction survey that publishes results in real-time, it would be more compelling. Now, to use that to the company’s advantage, Great Clips must satisfy its customers. Though, isn’t that the idea anyway?

Come back tomorrow for Part 2 to learn more about word-of-mouth and its love/hate relationship with social media. In the meantime, click HERE to see a success story with social media coming from an unexpected source: Priceline. One highlight – after customers secure a hotel, flight, or rental car via the "Name Your Own Price" option, they can brag about their bidding prowess on an automatically-generated deal tweet. Check it out:

Everyday people talk about products they use and what things they like and/or dislike about them. The medium for these conversations varies and could be anywhere from a blog to a chat room to a face to face conversation. But when it comes time for a consumer to actually purchase a product, whose recommendation are they most likely to trust?

Mintel recently conducted a survey to find out just who the most influential recommendations come from. According to their data, 34% of U.S. Internet users who bought a product or service because of a recommendation, were told about the product/service by a friend or relative. 25% of those surveyed received the recommendation from a spouse or domestic partner. Interestingly, only 10% of people said that the recommendation came from a blogger or a chat room. This data shows that a personal recommendation from someone you know and trust is still extremely valuable.

There is also the question of what motivates people to recommend a product or service to others. As seen in the chart below, the number one reason is price.

Word-of-mouth marketing can be extremely beneficial for the right product or service. But to do it successfully you need to have a high quality product and provide a mechanism that allows people to quickly and easily tell others about it.

A couple of weeks ago I was fortunate enough to attend WOMM-U, which is the Word-of-Mouth Marketing Association’s annual education seminar. Attendees were able to meet and discuss best practices and case studies with other word-of-mouth marketers during the two day conference held in South Beach (Miami, Florida).

I learned many important things and was able engage in my own word-of mouth marketing by sharing with others information about EyeTraffic Media’s own word-of-mouth marketing service called JumpReach. Some of the most important points that were discussed include the following:

• Word-of-mouth marketing is here to stay and can be an extremely successful tactic when implemented and measured properly.
• Studies show that person-to-person recommendations have far greater impact on a consumer’s purchase decision than nearly any other form of marketing
• Best practices for campaigns include being transparent, never spamming, being authenticate and giving people something to talk about
• There is no exact formula to stay highly ranked in YouTube, but you should focus on your content and respond to comments/questions whether they are good or bad.

For more information about word-of-mouth marketing, you can visit the Word-of-Mouth Marketing Association or you can request a free assessment from our JumpReach team to find out how your business can use this valuable tactic.

Facebook has released “engagement ads” which will leverage the constant dialogue and interaction between its users.  This new ad format will prompt users to a call-to-action, whether it may be a comment, RSVP or becoming a fan of the sponsored product.  Then, the action and marketing message within the ad will be broadcasted to those connected to that particular user.  Incentives, such as “free” virtual gifts, are offered to encourage the distribution of these ad messages.  Facebook believes they will operate successfully with this ad model based on the simple idea that “marketing messages are more effective when they come from friends.”

Since word-of-mouth marketing tends to be extremely profitable for advertisers, Facebook will charge more for these new engagement ads.  Due to the site redesign last August, sponsored video broadcasting has become available.  These video ads are also expected to provide great return, as these formats allow users to interact using the same call-to-actions as engagement ads.  At this pace, Facebook expects revenues to double to between $300 million and $350 million this year.