Travelzoo Viral Email Campaign Lets Users Play and Builds Customer Referrals
We all know the power of viral marketing. But the question is, how do you create a campaign that truly connects and engages your audience and encourages them to pass along your message voluntarily?
As a frequent traveler and lover of deals, I am a regular subscriber to Travelzoo’s Top 20 weekly emails. For those of you that are not familiar with the site, Travelzoo is a website that evaluates and publishes travel deals for hundreds of leading travel companies. For a traveler on a limited budget like me, it’s a great resource.
The reason for writing this post is that I recently received an email from Travelzoo that promoted their “Win the entire top 20” sweepstakes, which in my opinion is a great example of a campaign that engages subscribers, encourages repeat visits, and most importantly, referrals to friends. How did they do this, you ask? They’ve created a micro-site complete with a “clear the clouds” board game, trivia questions and the ability to post links/banners to the promotional site on social media sites that allow subscribers to earn more entries into the sweepstakes. If you have the time take a look - but be careful it’s addictive.
I think that this promotion is a pretty compelling offer to begin with, but with the addition of these engagement tools, it’s much more powerful. You can bet I’ll be paying repeat visits to this site and as this post proves, spreading the message amongst my peers!
I’m curious if anyone else is developing campaigns like this to build internal lists or lead databases – what is your strategy? What has worked for you and what hasn’t?

March 21st, 2008 at 6:26 pm
[…] Peter Greenberg wrote an interesting post today onHere’s a quick excerpt […]
March 22nd, 2008 at 4:43 am
That was an excellent use of viral marketing - this blog is a testiment to that! Cheers.
March 24th, 2008 at 5:33 pm
Viral marketing is gaining popularity now a days thanks to the social networking sites. with viral marketing we can get the mail address which can be used to build internal lists.