Top 10 Viral Marketing campaigns… #2

Doug Williams @ 3:06 am

This blog entry was posted on October 14, 2008.

#2 Hotmail (1996) Hotmail is the classic example of a viral campaign used to build a business. This was the first viral product of the internet age. Hotmail launched their free email service in July 1996. Within 18 months they had grown to 12,000,000 registered users. Every single email sent by Hotmail user included a small ad that promoted the service in the footer.

Creative: On July 4, 1996 Hotmail founders Jack Smith and Sabeer Bhatia launched a , free web based email service. They started with just $300,000 in venture capital funding. They gave away free e-mail addresses and email services. Attached to the footer of each outgoing email they attached a signature file that read: “Get your private, free email at http://www.hotmail.com.” They stood back and let the people using their network spread their offer to friends and associates.

Marketing Objective: How does a free email service make money? They make their revenue from the advertising on the website where users login. To be successful they need lots of traffic. In the first 18 months, Hotmail spent just $500K on branding, marketing, advertising and promotion with their viral marketing approach. Compare this to $20 million spent by Juno, Hotmail’s closest competitor who ended up with just a fraction of the number of users.

Results: By spending $500K in the first 18 months of operations, Hotmail recruited 12,000,000 users. By 2004 this grew to 65 million. Hotmail was purchased by Microsoft for $400 million and became part of its MSN network.

If You Like this posting please +1 it!

Filed under: Viral Marketing

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 14th, 2008 at 3:06 am and is filed under Viral Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

2 Comments

Thanks for the Hotmail case study. I’ve just blogged about the Don’t Vote viral video at http://beyonddigitalmedia.wordpress.com – this has been a major success heading into election 08.

Comment by Chris Bishops — October 14, 2008 @ 6:07 am
Great example of viral marketing! Thanks for sharing and the insight you provided

Comment by Maria Reyes-McDavis Viral Marketing — October 14, 2008 @ 9:30 pm

RSS feed for comments on this post. | TrackBack URL

Top 10 Viral Marketing campaigns… #2

If You Like this posting please +1 it!

2 Comments

Leave a comment