The Vagaries of Viral Marketing
When the email list for The Nation’s for-profit fundraising business started to get stale, associate publisher Peg Randall worked with consultants on a contest that the company hoped would refresh it.
When the list of over 200,000 email addresses for The Nation’s for-profit fundraising business, The Nation Associates, started to get stale, associate publisher Peg Randall worked with consultants on a contest that the company hoped would refresh it: Spread the word and get a chance to spend a day with the staff in The Nation’s New York City offices.
The company sent a series of emails to their existing list and designed homepage ads alerting readers to the contest. Recipients were encouraged to “tell-a-friend” by entering individual email addresses or accessing their existing address books.
“We wanted to try a contest and that idea seemed kind of obvious,” Randall says. “Our readers are very devoted to us. They see our editors and writers on TV all the time and they’re very familiar with us, so we thought they’d love the idea of coming to the offices and meeting the staff in person. The idea came from a talk radio station that I listen to where they often feature a guest DJ who would spend the day on air after giving a donation to the station.”
The results, however, were not as stellar as expected. The contest only brought in 2,000 new addresses. Although they didn’t have any expectations, Randall says, they were hoping for better results.
“For the amount of work that went into it, we would have liked to have gotten some more names,” she says. “I’m not sure I’d do it the same way again. Maybe selecting prizes that were of more general interest might have fared better. Hopefully, the addresses we got were good names. This contest definitely taught us a lot about the process of viral marketing.”
“The contest was a little too restrictive,” says circulation VP Art Stupar. “What we do give away in the future has to be something that’s easy to deliver. A lot of sports radio stations give away big screen televisions so that the winner can watch sports. Maybe we can offer the same, so the winner can watch the Democratic Convention.”
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