With a Little Help From My Friends...

Your best friend recommended you try the new sushi restaurant in town. You trust your friend’s opinion – maybe more than the newspaper restaurant critic. You try the new restaurant and you are so impressed with the spider roll you become a regular.

What is the connection to your email marketing campaign?

Allow your current subscribers the opportunity to recommend your eNewsletter to their friends. There may be no better argument for reading an email than a suggestion to do so from a friend. But you must make it as easy as possible for your message to be forwarded.

Include a well-designed Forward to a Friend graphic in every message you send. It should be at the bottom of your email and it should be clear. Your subscribers may not think of passing the message along unless you suggest it.

Your Forward to a Friend page should include simple language and a link to your privacy policy. Also include assurance that you are not harvesting your subscribers’ friend’s email address.

Your subscribers should be able to add a comment at the top of the email. If the message is simply forwarded to a friend, it may be mistaken as spam. By adding an endorsement from a friend you have added quite possibly the most important line of copy to your email. If your subscribers say “Check this out” there is a strong possibility their friends will. Additionally, your subscriber’s name should appear in the subject line: “Joe Smith thought you would be interested in this.”

Your forwarded message should include a link to your opt-in form. Because your ultimate goal is to grow your list, include language that says “If you received this email from a friend, we invite you to subscribe” on your original message. Even with the Forward to a Friend option available, there will be subscribers that will bypass the Forward to Friend option and simply forward the message themselves to their friends.

Don’t forget to monitor your Forward to a Friend responders. What percentage of your readers were compelled to pass your message along? While you won’t capture all of the forwards (see above) you will still get an interesting snapshot of what is working in your message.

Shy away from offering incentives for forwarding messages. You will be more likely to receive bad addresses, annoyed recipients and a stronger possibility of being reported as a spammer. It also has the potential to make your subscriber feel underhanded. While you will stay away from offering incentives, don’t forget to thank your current subscribers for forwarding your message. They are helping you build the list for your email marketing campaign with first-rate subscribers.