Email #3: Viral Case Study One - Hotmail

Dear <firstname> ,
MSN Hotmail’s viral marketing success story is
practically in the realm of folk lore.

Back in 1995, when Sabeer Bhatia and Jack Smith
approached the venture capital firm of Draper Fisher
 & Jervetson with their idea for a free email service,
 the firm liked the idea but wondered how they would 
attract members and build a company around it. Today
 there are more than 30 million active members.

The Hotmail user base grew faster than any media 
company in history; faster than CNN and AOL!
Hotmail tripled its size in one year. The current sign-up
rate for new memberships often exceeds a million per week. 

Tom Draper is the one who actually suggested that they 
should append an advertising message to every outbound 
email: “P.S. Get your free email at Hotmail” and called it 
viral marketing. 

It was a very bold move at the time. Would users balk at 
having this automatic addition to the content of their private
messages? Hotmail tempered the idea by clearly marking the
promotional plug and removing the “P.S.”.

Still, every outbound message conveyed an advertisement 
and a subtle implied endorsement by the sender. The recipient
 knew that the sender was a Hotmail user and that this new 
free email thing seemed to work for them. Each new user 
became a 'salesman' and the message spread like an extremely 
contagious virus. 

At the end of the day, Hotmail’s recipe for success is pretty
simple. It delivers the qualities consumers really want in an 
e-mail service: speed, reliability, ease of use and a rich set of 
features. And helped by the power of viral marketing, the rest 
as they say, is history.

The next success story involves a little communication tool 
you probably have in your PC right now. Stay tuned.

To your successful viral campaigns,

“Your Name”
“Your Website Link”

