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Viral Hall of Fame 2006 Return to Viral Hall of Fame 2006 Home Page

#9. Monk-e-Mail
http://www.monk-e-mail.com

Monk-e-Mail MarketingSherpa Summary:
This campaign uses elements that we've seen before quite a few times in the overcrowded field of viral e-card campaigns. Consumers get to play with an interactive form (including adding their own audio) and then send a silly e-card to friends. We've all been there, done that, got the t-shirt. So why did it make Sherpa's 2006 hall of fame? Check out the landing page. It's the best we've ever seen for this type of campaign because everything's included above the fold on just one page. You don't have to click through a screen by screen process to send an e-card. And we bet that meant considerably higher response rates.

Agency: Cramer-Krasselt
Client/company: CareerBuilder.com
Brand campaign was conducted for: CareerBuilder.com
Launch date of campaign: 1/25/2006
Target audience/demographic: Everyone online

Campaign Goal:
CareerBuilder.com set out to simply extend its popular 'Working with Monkeys' TV campaign to the internet.

Creative:
Monk-e-mail allows consumers to choose and accessorize one of three monkeys. Type in, record a message by phone for the monkey to lip-sync, or select a pre-recorded message, and then send it to friends and co-workers.

Seed Strategy:
In the first week of monk-e-mail, one email was sent to all CareerBuilder.com employees (approx 1500) and one email was sent to all agency employees (approx 300). There were no marketing dollars spent to promote this campaign.

Buzz Generated:
The campaign was picked up in many different press mediums: blogs, newspapers, TV shows, message boards, etc. Here are links to some great pieces of coverage: Plus hundreds of other blogs who have mentioned Monk-e-Mail or posted their own.

Specific (Goal-Related) Campaign Results:
Since its launch on 25 January 2006, Monk-e-mail has seen over 7 million unique visitors. Over 14 million Monk-e-mails have been sent, and played, as of March 21, 2006. And all of this with zero marketing dollars spent to send traffic.

Biggest Learning:
A good viral idea has to be cool and entertaining, yet simple. Based on enthusiastic internal feedback for Monk-e-Mail we knew we were on to a potentially explosive viral idea. But frankly, the results blew us away. The first week saw more than 250,000 sessions and required linking an additional 350 phone lines to the site just to handle the record-by-phone function, which isn't even the most popular method of creating a Monk-e-Mail message. We've learned that it's better to plan for explosive growth and 'over-engineer' the back-end to handle huge spikes in traffic. The biggest surprise is the number of people that are including links to Monk-e-Mail within their personal websites and blogs. To date, Google returns over 84,600 results for Monk-e-Mail 7 weeks after launch.


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