Marketplace

What is a Viral Mailer?

A viral mailer is a special type of Permission Based Email Marketing Service, providing its members with direct access to each members email. Members can email their own promotions, affiliate links, joint venture requests, etc. They send info about their websites in return for viewing the emails sent by the other members.Viral mailers, although similar to safelists, are NOT safelists! Viral mailers are much more sophisticated and much more superior. They place high limitations on the frequency with which emails can be sent, which prevents the abuse of the system and keeps the volume of emails in a reasonable level.Members are encouraged and rewarded with credits for reading emails; Members are never advised to open a secondary email account and use it purely to receive mailings from other members...Often in safelists, you have to register with 2 emails, one for your list and another one for administration so the safelist owner can send his messages directly to your inbox, but the fellow marketer members, can only send it to a bogus safelist email... the one other members hardly open.Altogether, you are much more likely to find a productive viral mailer than a productive safelist...

Email Hog is an example of a Viral Mailer.  There are many out there, and most offer free memberships.

Do Mailers Actually Work?

Yes, they really do work, if you use them the correct way.  Mailers don't often cater to a specific niche market, so you'll be sending a lot of emails to a lot of people that might not be your target market, but within that market will inevitably be a percentage of people that will be interested in what you have to offer.  Here is the basic strategy:

1.  Create a capture form (you can do this EBB, and I will cover how to make your capture forms in another article).  The purpose of a capture form is to get their name and email address so that you can email them directly.  Most of the time, you will want to setup an autoresponder that will email them with more information about your product and a link to either signup or purchase it.  I will cover autoresponders more in detail in another article, but basically they are just automated emails that get sent out to a subscriber over the course of several days or weeks.  When you create your capture forms in EBB, you can connect it to an autoresponder to get subscribers.  Any contact you capture on a form become a lead in EBB.

2. Build a landing page.  You can do this in EBB with their drag and drop page builder.  You can also create HTML snippets of your own that you can use over and over in different pages.  I recommend trying out different layouts and different headlines so you can figure out what gives you the best conversion rates.  You then place your form on the landing page.  Each page you create in EBB, is publically available via an automatically generated shorturl.  You can even customize the shorturl if you'd like to!

3.  Your next step is create an email that is not too wordy, but will give the reader enough information about what you are offereing to get them interested.  It is a good idea to not be too mysterious otherwise you will end up just driving useless traffic to your landing page.  If you are promoting Easy Business Builder, they have emails you can use under their affiliate tools, so you won't have to come up with your own.  They also have landing pages and some capture forms that you can import into your account, as well as an autoresponder.

4.  Once you have your landing page with a capture form on it and your emails all ready to go, you are ready to start sending out emails to viral mailers.  Members of each viral mailer will read your emails, some will click the link and go to your landing page, and a percentage of those people will fill in their name and email address to get more information.  

Now you are building a list!