With the advances in technology coupled with the fact that many people, particularly in the business to business community now have Internet access and personal e-mail accounts both at work and at home, as such many companies now choose to support their existing direct marketing and off-the page initiatives with e-marketing and viral marketing campaigns.

These can take the form of rich text HTML e-mails that deliver a sales message straight to the recipient’s desktop using animated graphics and text.
On receipt of the e-mail users can choose to click through to a micro-site to find out more about a particular product or service offering. These sites are individually developed to support the client's marketing initiative and will usually contain content pertinent only to the product or services offered in the initial e-mail.

Sometimes, the recipients e-mail software is not set-up to, or is not capable of receiving the e-mail message in its original and intended graphical HTML format, in these instances the recipient will receive a plain text e-mail with the same sales message minus any graphical content and, with a link through to the micro-site.

For client's wishing to build on an existing database of e-mails, they may choose to employ a viral marketing campaign to fulfill this objective.

Similar to E-marketing the client will send an HTML e-mail to a list of recipients, and then relies on them to forward this on to friends and/or colleagues who then also visit the client's micro-site to register their details for the offer.

Usually these viral marketing initiatives are heavily incentivised in order to promote traffic to their site and/or game and, to get people to register their e-mail addresses and other personal details.