The Viral Email Report: How to Make Your Emails Go Viral

We tend to associate “going viral” with social media—in part because it’s relatively easy to see and measure the very public noise of social sharing in terms of likes, favorites, and retweets. However, the much quieter email forward is often a much more powerful influencer.

In our latest research report, The Viral Email, we used Litmus’ Email Analytics to better understand the quiet, often invisible influence of email forwards by analyzing the forwards generated by more than 400,000 email sends. Once we had a good view of the full spectrum of email forwarding and had constructed benchmarks around forward-to-open rates, we analyzed more than 200 emails from among the top 1% of viral emails and another 200-plus emails from around the 50th percentile.

We looked at the tactics and topics of these two groups of emails and compared them—identifying those elements that increase forward-to-open rates. The findings—some of which were truly surprising—highlight a number of opportunities that email marketers have to increase how much their emails are passed along.

>> Download The Viral Email report