Don't Miss Opportunity: Use Forward-to-a-Friend

As I was reading through my email first thing this morning, I had the usual messages from retailers telling me all about their sales and promotions and free shipping. Standard board of fare. Some of it was compelling and some of it could have benefited from some better creative. But that's another story...

What I noticed with a majority of the messages was a lack of forward-to-a-friend functionality. Of course, I can click forward through my email client and send the message to my friends that way, but these big brands are missing out on capturing data associated with forwarding these messages by adding the functionality to do so, such as the number of messages forwarded through the tool and how many new subscribers resulted from forwarded messages.

The forward-to-a-friend call to action in the email serves as a visual queue to remind subscribers to send the message to their friends. Without the reminder, many subscribers will simply not pass it along. It just doesn't occur to them to do it.

Message rendering is another benefit of integrating this functionality into your email marketing campaign. I know that when I use my email client to forward HTML messages to my friends, the messages never look right. So the messages I thought about sharing with my friends this morning, didn't get forwarded. I know it's too big of a hassle for them to see what I thought they might like. However, using a forward-to-a-friend tool in the message, almost guarantees proper rendering.

Retailers who are not including this functionality in their messaging are missing the boat. Missing an opportunity to grow their subscriber base and increase their sales.