Hotmail - The Classic Viral Marketing Success Story

Hotmail – The Classic Viral Marketing Success Story

Posted by admin | Filed under Viral Campaigns

: An early piece of classic viral marketing

Ok so most know the story of Hotmail. But just to be sure it would be a little remiss of me not to include it here. It is a prime example of how good viral marketing can extremely effectively grow your brand or online service.

So you all know hotmail right? The online free email service. Back in the day, (1996/7) it was one of few. It stood out as an email service becuase;

It was free.
You could access it anywhere.
You could have multiple accounts

The Viral Bit

Users would send their email and each Hotmail message sent arrived in someone’s mailbox with the words “Get your free email at Hotmail” at the bottom.
By clicking on the word Hotmail, the recipient was taken to Hotmail’s home page where the free e-mail service was explained.

How Effective Was It?

Very. People signed up in their thousands. Myth has it they spent $500, 000 in 2 years to gain 12 million subscribers. That’s U$0.04 per subscriber. Not bad huh? Especially seeing as they soon sold to Microsoft for around $400 million !!!

Such a scheme is unlikely to work in the current climate, but what with the advent of social networks and every day new services such as Twitter hitting the main stream what will be the next big message to go viral in the same way Hotmail did ?