The combination of e-mail and word-of-mouth affords marketers a potentially vast, and very powerful, new marketing tool. Email with its high penetration among Internet users, remains largely untapped, reports eMarketer.

In 2006, almost 90 percent of US Internet users are e-mail users. This represents 56.4 percent of total population that have emails.

The number is still growing constantly that it was predicted in 2010, 92.2 percent of US Internet users are going to use email regularly. That is about 61 percent of total US population.

Consumer generated content is the latest trend today. It is not going anywhere soon. Blogs, social networks, video and other type of content are all participatory.

E-mail could be used to trigger word of mouth or its variations such as viral marketing, buzz marketing or word-of-mouse. The key is segmentation. Only target those who have the potential to pass-along to others.

There are two most important factors to generate and help word-of-mouth:

1. Satisfied customers (53.3 percent)
2. Great products and services (27.5 percent)

Among other less popular factors include great brand (13.3 percent) and having an advertising agency or public relations firm (1.7 percent).

Marketers can take those facts in many ways to let the customers spread the news, virtually turning the customers into sales persons.

My thoughts: A good word-of-mouth marketing doesn’t only trigger recipients to tell others — such as forward to friends — but also helps build anticipation.

Anticipation is a very powerful characteristic of email marketing, because it can increase deliverability, open rate and clickthrough or response rate, all at the same time.

Source: eMarketer.