• by February 2, 2001

It's a hot buzzword on the marketing scene, but most marketers think Viral Marketing is an art, not a science. In a attempt to measure attitudes and develop some quantitative criteria for adding Viral Marketing to the strategic mix, IMT Strategies recently completed an Internet survey on the subject, and many of our readers participated in responding to the questionnaire.

The results are in, and the complete report is available to you here.

The company says "the core value of this report is that it provides fundamental design points necessary to begin to understand and integrate viral marketing into your sales and marketing engine."

But wait, there’s more.

There’s a new questionnaire on the Web to assess the value of e-mail as a marketing tool, conducted by IMT. They would again be pleased to share the final report with our readers, and hope you will be included in their survey sample by responding to the survey located here.

Here are some of the results sought in the study:

- Factors that most significantly effect response rates and long-term customer penetration vs. attrition rates.

- Impact of "opt-in" vs. "opt-out" permission policies on campaign effectiveness.

- Changing priorities among marketers' embrace of eight primary models of permission e-mail marketing:

1. customer relationship

2. e-mail, corporate newsletters

3. triggered marketing (scheduled alerts)

4. permission networks

5. sponsored newsletters

6. sponsored discussion lists

7. viral marketing

8. partner co-marketing

- Levels of integration of e-mail functionality into other marketing technologies, strategies and cross-channel programs.

We’ll post it here when the study is complete.