With so many factors contributing to how your marketing message is spread among your customers, it's impossible to come up with a fool-proof strategy for effective word-of-mouth marketing, but by applying recent marketing research we can create innovative and educated strategies that are worth trying.

Chances are, no matter how much you know about your customers, you can't possibly know them in a personal sense, the way their peers do. So when they forward your marketing message, its because they know someone who might be interested in your offer, even if they themselves aren't. But what factors, if any, contribute to whether or not someone forwards a message? Altruism may play a role, and that's why a segment that is worth trying to tap into are voters; not necessarily voters in terms of U.S. politics, but customers that vote on issues related to your brand.

Recent research from Richard Jankowski and James Fowler, professors of political science at the State University of New York, Fredonia and the University of California, San Diego, respectively, has indicated that there is a high correlation between voting and levels of altruism. The reason posited is that individuals who vote don't necessarily vote with their personal interests in mind, but that they vote to support the communal interest of society (or your brand) as a whole. Even if passing on an email marketing message is as easy as clicking the forward-to-a-friend button, that message may be more likely to be spread around if the original recipient is characteristically altruistic. It's a bold assumption, but one that may be worth trying. Correlation aside, individuals that participate in a vote related to your brand are probably going to be more engaged by your company in the first place and consumer input is one of the easiest and cost-effective ways to determine what your customer base is interested in and what they may want changed. Even better, this type of behavioral segmentation is probably made even more valid if no incentive for participation is offered, since the goal is to determine those individuals who are most engaged in your brand.

The hard part is getting people to feel that it's important to voice their opinion, so whatever is going to be put up for the vote can't be trivial, but it doesn't have to be a big deal either. A while back, Frontier Airlines executed a successful viral marketing campaign where their passengers had to vote on the animals that got to be featured on the tails of their aircraft. You don't have to change your brand, but you have to make your customers feel like their votes will contribute to it.

So for what industries will the be most beneficial? Clearly, for this type of approach to work, a company has to be in the industries that generate the most word-of-mouth marketing. According to research by the Keller Fay Group, these would be the restaurant/food, entertainment and media, sports and hobbies, beverages, and retail industries. Additionally, industries that deal with computers and consumer electronics also may be able to benefit as they generate a great deal of user reviews and user generated content.