Forward to a friend 2.0

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Back when email marketing was new and shiny, a forward-to-a-friend tool was exciting, cutting-edge technology. Everybody wanted one.

And so the "send to a friend" link was born and became a part of the email furniture. You probably have one in your emails.

Do they work? Not often.

Can they work? Most definitely.

But the furniture needs dusting down and a fresh coat of varnish.

It's hard to find people who report much success with a send to a friend link. People discovered that hitting the forward button in their email software was a lot easier than clumsily copying and pasting addresses into online forms.

Send-to-a-friend became a relic, whose purpose is more to remind people to forward an email than serve as a medium for doing so.

Make email forwarding easier

One obvious option is to improve the cumbersome forwarding process. You might mirror the "be my friend" invitation technology used by Web 2.0 applications like LinkedIn to let forwarders import or select addresses directly from their webmail or Outlook accounts.

One vendor has reported up to 15-fold increases in forwards as a result of using such a tool.

Replace it with something better

Sharing content online is now more than forwarding emails. It's Facebook and MySpace and Digg and blogs etc.

So another option is to upgrade "forward to a friend" to "share with others," by replacing the "forward this" link with new links or tools that let recipients re-post content to their favorite social media sites.

The ever-excellent Loren McDonald agrees, noting that such a share facility solves many of the weaknesses of email forwarding. And he has some good suggestions on how to implement the concept.

Loren also cites a case study where one sender saw their message exposed to a much wider audience as a result of incorporating Facebook and MySpace functionality into an email.

It's another super example of how email and Web 2.0 technologies can complement each other (more examples here).

The dangers of sharing

In all the excitement over things like Facebook and Digg, don't forget that there are many folk who never heard of Web 2.0 or don't care to set up a Facebook account or share content on Digg.

Be careful not to annoy or alienate the large "Web 1.0 is enough for me" generation. And don't focus on the sharing mechanisms at the expense of the email's actual content and message.

When the social media links take up more space than the actual content, it's time to reassess both.

The best way to get people to spread your message is to create messages worth spreading. Obvious, but often forgotten in the Web 2.0 frenzy. We're back (again) to the idea of value. As I wrote in an earlier article on Web 2.0:

"All these new tools and technologies, like email itself, are conduits for content. Not an end in themselves."

Also be careful to keep your objectives in mind (another case of "obvious but often forgotten").

The content and messages that are shared most frequently aren't necessarily those that contribute best to your objectives. You are likely looking for more than just "reach." At the very least you want greater reach among your target audience.

Case in point: the most viral content on this blog was a short skit I did on the Internet in Ancient Rome. It hit Digg's front page but contributed a big fat zero to any significant measures of success (subscribers, feed readers, long-term pageview trends etc.)

So by all means track which types of messages are shared most widely. But don't use that as the only guide to planning future messages. Look at all the metrics before picking out "winning" offers, messaging or content.

P.S. If you like this post, consider putting it on Facebook, bookmarking it at del.icio.us, blogging it or running through the office with a copy in your hand shouting "Eureka! Eureka!"

[This post brought to you by Campaigner Email Marketing]
Permalink | October 01, 2008 | 2 comment(s)
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2 Comments:

The thing many people don't realize when building forward-to-a-friend functionality is that these messages come from their site, and affect their deliverability.

It doesn't matter whose email address is in the From: header; that's unauthenticated, and thus looks exactly like a malicious forgery. The reputation attaches to the IP address (and possibly the domain) which sent the mail.

MAAWG recently published a document on email forwarding best practices; most of that advice applies here, too.
By J.D., on 01 October, 2008

Thanks JD (also for the useful link). I recall there are also legal issues to bear in mind with regard to "commercial" forwarded emails. All the more reason to investigate the "share" concept.
By Mark Brownlow, on 01 October, 2008

Comments closed during migration to a new blog platform in early May