5 Tips from Zondervan's Jonathan Petersen

Zondervan's web site is "circular" in nature, with emails feeding traffic to the site, and the site, in turn, feeding email sign-ups. "The whole idea is to motivate people to talk about Zondervan," says Jonathan Petersen, Director of Internet Marketing for the publisher. "We're overtly encouraging people to tell each other about us."

Here are Jonathan's five tips for creating a site that encourages word of mouth:

Tip #1. Begin with consumer needs
A site won't work unless consumer needs are first met. Only then have you earned permission to ask if you can market to them. Zondervan made sure search and browse functionalities worked first so consumers could find what they were after.

Tip #2. Incorporate WOM into your mission
Zondervan's Internet marketing team established a new mission statement to "identify, understand, engage, and motivate the consumer." In other words, the WOM factor is built right into the core mission of the company.

Tip #3. Invite consumers into an experience
The Zondervan includes an "engagement column," which offers visitors ways to become more connected with the authors and the products. For example, the column offers a Bible verse of the day, an Author Tracker, and a Breakfast Club.

Tip #4. Include a value proposition
In order to get people to forward emails to friends, they must get something out of it, and must believe their friends will, too. Zondervan's verse of the day includes an interpretation of the verse through an image. The image, like the verse, changes daily.

Most people expect just the verse, and are "surprised and delighted" with the images. Since the images have been added, the forwards have spiked.

Zondervan also delights customers through feedback response: any time someone writes to the company with site feedback, they are sent a free book.

Tip #5. Create relationships
The Zondervan Breakfast Club is a daily email excerpt from a Zondervan book. The email also includes a few paragraphs penned by a woman who writes a personal note about her life each day. The same book is excerpted every day for a week.

By the end of the week, the reader has gotten to read more than a chapter of the book, and has formed a relationship with the email author.

"It's about those relationships," says Jonathan, "which makes people more likely to talk about it."

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