Now just what does a virus have to do with marketing? The terminology viral marketing basically describes any type of marketing strategy that encourages consumers to pass on a marketing message. Through this word of mouth style of advertising there is a huge potential for the marketing message to gain massive exposure and influence. So just like a virus, viral marketing takes full advantage of rapid multiplication in order to get a message out to huge numbers of people.

You are told every flu season to pay extra attention to personal hygiene: things like wash your hands often, do not rub your eyes and try and stay away from others who may be sick. A virus will only spread if it is easy to transmit. This is why viral email marketing can be so effective because communicating by email is super easy and inexpensive. If you keep your marketing message short and to the point you will find that your email marketing campaign will be a big success. This is because a short attention grabbing message is going to stick in the minds of consumers more then a longer more boring message.

A truly savvy viral email marketing plan will take full advantage of the most common of human motivations. For instance most all consumers are driven by the need to feel like part of the in crowd and the need to have the latest and greatest products is another common motivator. The motivation to need to communicate with others and get almost instant responses is a huge motivating factor in why billions of email messages are sent each and every day.

Most everyone is the world is a semi-social person. Scientific experts in studying social behaviors report that each individual has a social network of between eight to twelve people. When people communicate on the internet they begin to develop relationships just the same as you would do offline. Email addresses are collected and favorite websites are saved to favorites. Affiliate programs are masters at exploiting online social networks as are opt in email lists. If you learn to cleverly put your marketing message in all of the communicating that you do online you will quickly see how fast your message will be heard.

A viral email marketing campaign can work wonders for your business if you are able to capitalize on common human behavior to speed along its transmission.