Friday, June 18, 2004

Google's viral marketing of GMail

GMail's viral marketing campaign has been very well executed. It was a simple technique. Start with a small user base (many of which were Google employees), then repeatedly give out small numbers of invites to the existing GMail users for friends and colleagues. The pool of users grows exponentially, but in a controllable way, and every user feels like their few invites are scarce and precious.

I has assumed that they were restricting supply of the accounts because it was a beta test, but there's more here. The artificial shortage of supply creating such demand and buzz that people have been paying to get invites. People who have a GMail account feel exclusive, elite, like part of a club, all because of the shortage of supply. Now everyone wants a GMail account.

2 comments:

Seun Osewa said...

Every bubble eventually bursts; there's a remorse that members of this exclusive club would feel when their "precious treasure" becomes freely available. Besides, GMail may have lost its bite thanks to Yahoo Mail's upgrade to 100mb. GMail still doesn't allow one to compose and send HTML e-mails, doesn't work on all browsers, can't be scraped to support POP3 or IMAP ...

Will said...

I must add that while Google's GMail may lack the features you mentioned, it is in beta...