Dropbox: Viral Marketing lessons

I was amazed looking at the marketing strategy of dropbox on how they added more than 12 million users over the period of 4 years 2007-2010 using referral marketing. Here is how they did it.

Build Your Community Before You Even Have a Product -- Don't make the mistake that you need to have a fully launched and market-ready product before you can get people to talk about it. Dropbox tested landing pages and a private beta program as an effort to generate interest in the product and begin to build a community while the product was still in the development process. Letting users into the process early helped to provide a sense of ownership while it gave the company valuable feedback needed to make the product better.

Encourage Word-of-Mouth -- People were already talking about Dropbox, but to ramp up the conversation, the company started a referral program that offered customers incentives to recommend the application to others. This one simple change permanently increased new users by 60%. Additionally, Dropbox made changes to their product that made it easier for users to share their love for Dropbox with others. For example, they offered the feature of shared folders, which allows one folder of documents to be shared with multiple users, subsequently encouraging users to invite others to share access to folders.

Read more: http://blog.hubspot.com/blog/tabid/6307/bid/5956/5-Viral-Marketing-Lessons-From-Dropbox.aspx#ixzz29o9O4WXb