Let’s be clear. You don’t need existing email lists to launch blockbuster email campaigns that generate word of mouth.
Harry’s, as you’ll see shortly, is a ready example you want to emulate. They started with 12 people on their mailing list, and all 12 were employees, not even marketing leads.
And all 12 were their employees. Not even their marketing leads!
Whether you have a list or not, you’ll discover exactly how to use email to drive word of mouth marketing success for your brand leveraging email.
You probably know the stats already.
Your customers have a 92% chance of chance of trusting recommendations from people they know, while only 37 percent trust search-engine ads.
A word-of-mouth recommendation from a trusted friend is 50 times more likely to lead to a purchase.
Existing customers spend 67% more money on your business than new customers.
Customers gained via word-of-mouth boost profit margins by 25 Percent
Email converts more leads to buyers than any other marketing medium.
You might be thinking, “OK, Nicholas, enough with the stats. Where do I start?”
Start from where you stand right now — your email campaign launchpad.
I call the starting point of your word of mouth campaign your launchpad.
No list? No problem.
You can adapt your email campaign to fit your situation — whether you have a list or not. You can instantly build and profit from your list.
What you need is a carefully crafted email sequence.
Bryan Harris of VideoFruit shared Laura Elizabeth’s story. Her email campaign to new subscribers generates over $2,000 in sales on average, on autopilot.
Image Credit: VideoFruit
No, Laura’s story isn’t a word-of-mouth example
The point is you can build email list using a sequence of messaged even without subscribers in the beginning
Albeit, in this case, you want to craft your email series to drive word of mouth marketing for your business.
Yes, your campaign can start small. But it doesn’t have to stay small. I’ll call these starting points “launchpads.”
Launchpads vary, depending on whether you have a list or not. And the size of your list, if you have one, influences your launchpad too.
You have three email campaign launchpads:
Launching on your site
Using on other people’s platforms
Leveraging on your existing email list
Let’s explore these campaign launchpads.
You can use this launchpad if your subscriber list is small or nonexistent. And you can also use it if you don’t want to pay other people to launch your campaign on their sites.
Here’s how Harry’s used their site as their launchpad.
Harry’s: Subscription Shaving Sticks that Rival Gillette
Starting with no email subscribers, Harry’s grew to 100,000 people on their list in just a week.
Here’s how they did it.
Step #1: Network and Leverage Your Closest Allies
Harry’s had only 12 employees when they started, including the two founders, Jeff Raider and Andy Katz-Mayfield.
According to Jeff, they had spent some time gathering emailsfrom people they knew. Before their pre-launch week, the founders of Harry’s talked to more than 100 people in person. And every time they spoke to people at meetings and events about the project, they collected their email addresses.
It’s vital that you leverage your existing network.
Your closest allies might be the ones who’d care enough to drive your message like it’s theirs. In Jeff’s words,
“More than 200 participants referred more than 50 of their friends, achieving the highest tier reward. These were largely people who were close to us with large followings or access to companies that sent out blasts on our behalf.”
Here’s the graph of how Harry’s word of mouth campaign performed.
Image credit: The Tim Ferriss Show
Step #2: Put Your Network to Work
Harry’s created a two-page microsite: a landing page to collect email addresses
The shaving startup’s employees sent out personalized email messages to everyone on their contacts list. They informed their targets of the launch and asked them to sign up on Harry’s landing page to get incentives.
Image credit: CrazyEgg.com
And a second page to invite word of mouth buzz. This page is also designed to generate a unique URL per email address automatically.
Image credit: CrazyEgg.com
If you’re tech-savvy or can get someone to help you, Harry’s avails their microsite’s codes on GitHub for free. You can even download the codes for this microsite from a link they provided on Tim Ferriss’s site, here.
Step #3: Protect Your Rewards
Of the 100,000 emails that came to Harry’s, 15 percent were duds. Some people tried to game the referral program. And the most targeted was the highest reward tier!
Harry’s had anticipated this would happen. To safeguard their promotion, they set up IP blocking to prevent double entry from one IP and also used SendGrid to weed out illegitimate email addresses.
What Worked for Harry’s and Why
Although Harry’s had predicted the success of their campaign, they exceeded their best prediction in one day.
They’d hit 15,000 subscribers in one day.
Image credit: The Tim Ferriss Show
Jeff gave out the exact template they used for the first email messages their employees sent. Employees were to personalize that email message, but they followed that template to make things easy for everyone.
They also made it easy for their employees to pass their message to entire companies. And for that, Jeff also created a custom email template.
This launchpad leverages on bloggers, paid traffic, and social media influencers. goal here is to build a robust email list and then launch your campaign to that community you created.
If you have money to acquire subscribers, this is a great route to go.
Email converts better and goes well with word of mouth. You’re more likely to get six times the click-through rate on a message you send by email than tweets.
And email is 40 times more effective for campaigns than social media fronts like Facebook or Twitter.
So it makes sense to build an email list first and then use that list to launch your word of mouth marketing.
How Pinterest Leveraged Other People’s Platforms
Today Pinterest has many reasons to be loved, and that’s why 335 million people use it every month. But it wasn’t always that way.
Most of Pinterest's first adopters came from Des Moines, the hometown of the app’s founder, Ben Silbermann.
These early users learned of the app from Silbermann’s family and friends. When Pinterest’s growth stalled at 3,000 users, Ben tried to grow its user base by finding regular users—people who enjoy the app.
Ben and his team looked to word-of-mouth marketing to scale their app. They organized meetups and turned attendees into evangelists.
Here’s how you can leverage Pinterest’s word-of-mouth tactics.
Step #1: Create an Invite-Only Campaign
Image Credit: TechCrunch
Pinterest used a campaign called Pin-It-Forward. The idea was to get bloggers to create Pinterest boards and then invite their audiences to remix those boards using their invite links.
This campaign was so successful that when Pinterest officially launched in the UK in 2013, it used the same campaign from 2010. To make British users feel at home, the app made UK English an option.
Step #2: Leverage Influencers to Collect Emails
Influencer marketing is one of the most profitable channels you can explore. It gives you $6 for every $1 spent.
Pinterest availed their invite-only Pin-It-Forward campaign through influential bloggers.
Participants referred by these bloggers would sign up with their email addresses and then gain access to Pinterest to create boards using elements from the influencer’s boards.
Step #3: Offer Badges to Bloggers to Win Attention to Your Campaign
Blogs that participated in the Pin-It-Forward campaign got badges that linked back to their Pin-It-Forward boards. These badges drove attention to the campaign and got Pinterest more sign-ups.
What Worked for Pinterest and Why
The founder of Pinterest already found that DIY audiences enjoyed Pinterest back at home, so he doubled down on that audience.
Pinterest had enjoyed word-of-mouth success with its grassroots effort in Des Moines, so they continued that “grassroots” marketing using bloggers to get word of mouth online.
The Pin-It-Forward campaign relied on DIY activity images, continuing what Ben was trying to achieve—getting people like himself to onboard the app.
Pinterest also benefited from users introducing friends and family.
Lessons from Pinterest:
• Know your target audience and double down on attracting them.
• Reach that audience via platforms they frequent and through people who influence their decisions.
• Design a campaign that your audience’s influencers will love to share.
• Collect emails from participants.
• Encourage participants to share their experiences with friends and family.
What’s better than having a sizable list of subscribers who want to hear from you? Getting them to tell others about you.
Email and word of mouth are a perfect match for three reasons:
More than nine in every ten people trust recommendations from friends.
People give their friend’s recommendation twice the attention they give others.
Customers from word-of-mouth campaigns spend up to 25 percent more money than everyone else.
See How Dropbox Used Email to Generate Word-of-Mouth Buzz
See how Dropbox used email to generate word of mouth buzz.
Dropbox jumped from 100,000 to 4 million users in one year and three months. It became a Unicorn valued at over $10 billion.
In 2018 alone, the cloud storage behemoth earned almost $1.4 billion in revenue, a 26 percent year-on-year growth. The service now has more than half a billion users, and 12.3 million are paying customers.
In its early days, Dropbox doubled its user base every three months, thanks to its referral program..
But what made the referrals so potent?
The invite email!
Once you get your free storage space on Dropbox, they’d ask you to invite your friends to get even more space.
Here’s Dropbox’s step by step for the email campaign that generated their word of mouth buzz.
Step #1: Tell Your Subscribers How They’ll Benefit
Dropbox explained the benefits of inviting friends. They created a page on how to get more space by inviting friends.
And added links clarifying any confusing part.
Step #2: Create a Signup Page
Existing users could invite new subscribers to sign up.
Step #3: Invite New Subscribers to Earn More Rewards
New subscribers were asked to bring friends onboard to earn even more rewards.
Dropbox lets you send invites via email to contacts on Gmail or Yahoo Mail just by typing the contact name.
When the message reaches recipients, it shows your name in the email title and body, confirming authenticity.
Dropbox caps rewards for free accounts at 16 GB (500 MB per referral). One person can keep inviting new users until they earn the full 16 GB.
What Worked for Dropbox and Why
Why did Dropbox’s email campaign work so well?
• Clear benefits and instructions.
• A help page to guide participants.
• Simple signup and referral flow.
• Easy mass invites from contact lists.
• Follow-up welcome emails that include referral links.
Conditional Email Campaigns to Boost Word-of-Mouth Buzz
You can make these email campaigns run automatically too. So when your subscribers or customers take a particular action, it’d trigger an invite.
Casper and Airbnb use triggered email invites after specific customer actions. Casper offers referral rewards for mattress reviews and Airbnb offers $40 for referring new hosts.
And Airbnb offers $40 for referring new hosts.
You can use more than one launchpad depending on how much time, people, and money you have.
Although Harry’s didn’t use other people’s platforms, they could have. According to Jeff, they deliberately kept their marketing as organic as possible.
You can also use all three launchpads:
• Get friends, family, and your community to spread your word of mouth via email.
• Pay bloggers and influencers to share your message and invite sign-ups.
• Get your subscribers and visitors to generate word of mouth.
You can mix and match your email campaigns to maximize your word of mouth buzz.
Happy sharing!
Nicholas Godwin is a writer for CandyBar and ReferralCandy.
