Friends Who Shop Together… SOME MARKETERS shy away from viral marketing in which the recipient of an e-mail message is encouraged to pass it along to a friend. It can pull big, but the word brings to mind images of massive system breakdowns at worst, and at best, companies barraging their customers’ friends with spam.
Veronique Bardach, CEO of Inshop.com Inc., got around that bugaboo by calling a recent campaign “spiral” instead of viral marketing, carefully designing it to reflect her customers’ interests and being sure the referee’s name was in the subject line.
The result was a flood of new members for her online shopping-resource site: The new member referral rate was 30%.
New York-based Inshop e-mails early sale notifications, shopping alerts and fashion events about members’ high-end local retailers to whomever opts in to receive them. Retailers such as Neiman Marcus and Bergdorf Goodman pay to have their sale or event the subject of the e-mails. Members receive the sort of e-mail they wish from the stores of their choice for free.
The promotion, which ran from April 14 to June 30, was developed to boost the membership rolls of the 10-month-old firm. Inserts in the May and June issues of Elle and banner ads in high-fashion Web sites offered a chance for a $5,000 shopping spree with a friend for joining up and passing on the e-mail of a friend. To be eligible, people had to recommend at least one friend, and could suggest up to five friends.
Most of the members participated. Three out of 10 of those referred became new members. The membership base exploded from around 15,000 pre-promotion to 98,000 by July.
“Our service is about shopping and it’s fun and it’s free,” remarks Bardach. “It’s something people enjoy talking about and sharing with their friends, so it’s truly an ideal service for a successful spiral campaign.”
The opt-out rate was “well below half a percentage point,” Bardach adds. Since the person who referred a friend would end up shopping with her, it discouraged people from recommending friends who wouldn’t be interested.
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