Marketing Engineering: Computer-Assisted Marketing Analysis and Planning
Marketing Engineering: Computer-Assisted Marketing Analysis and Planning
Customer Referral Management: Optimal Reward Programs
Marketing Science
Real-Time Evaluation of E-mail Campaign Performance
Marketing Science
Modeling the Underreporting Bias in Panel Survey Data
Marketing Science
Optimal decision making for online referral marketing
Decision Support Systems
Exploring the disseminating behaviors of eWOM marketing: persuasion in online video
Electronic Commerce Research
The multidimensional study of viral campaigns as branching processes
SocInfo'12 Proceedings of the 4th international conference on Social Informatics
Studying paths of participation in viral diffusion process
SocInfo'12 Proceedings of the 4th international conference on Social Informatics
Assessing the ripple effects of online opinion leaders with trust and distrust metrics
Expert Systems with Applications: An International Journal
International Journal of Intelligent Systems Technologies and Applications
Networked individuals predict a community wide outcome from their local information
Decision Support Systems
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In a viral marketing campaign, an organization develops a marketing message and encourages customers to forward this message to their contacts. Despite its increasing popularity, there are no models yet that help marketers to predict how many customers a viral marketing campaign will reach and how marketers can influence this process through marketing activities. This paper develops such a model using the theory of branching processes. The proposed viral branching model allows customers to participate in a viral marketing campaign by (1) opening a seeding e-mail from the organization, (2) opening a viral e-mail from a friend, and (3) responding to other marketing activities such as banners and offline advertising. The model parameters are estimated using individual-level data that become available in large quantities in the early stages of viral marketing campaigns. The viral branching model is applied to an actual viral marketing campaign in which over 200,000 customers participated during a six-week period. The results show that the model quickly predicts the actual reach of the campaign. In addition, the model proves to be a valuable tool to evaluate alternative what-if scenarios.