The Glengarry Leads: Building Successful Word-of-Mouth Campaigns Online
By Anthony Schneider
Reprinted from MediaPost Email Insider
Consider this: if you're a city dweller with an email account, you can expect a barrage of more than 2,000 unsolicited commercial emails a year sent by legitimate marketers and 4,000 spam emails every day. At the same time, you're exposed to 5,000 pieces of advertising every day. That's a lot of marketing noise. Now think about how many word-of-mouth referrals and recommendations you get? One a day? Two a week?
Word-of-mouth marketing is a rarified currency. And that, in part, is why it's so effective. According to a recent McKinsey & Company study, more than 90% of consumers regard word-of-mouth as the best source of information about products and services. Everyday brand evangelists work. Happy customers constitute a powerful army of word-of-mouth advocates. And the opt-in friends of those satisfied customers are, in the David Mamet vernacular, "the Glengarry leads."
So, how do you get there? How do you make online word-of-mouth programs happen and figure out if they're a viable part of your marketing mix?
