 In any marketing medium, referrals are your best source for business growth and vitality. One person who spreads the good word about you to their friends and family does an agency's worth of your advertising, marketing and public relations. When your "talker" is a solid-gold trusted source, you can see why you need to do everything you can to encourage your readers to talk about you.
Traditional and direct marketers know the value of good word-of-mouth. When e-marketing through Web sites and email took off, word of mouth became reinvented as "viral marketing." Same idea, but the electronic nature of the medium means it needs to be approached from a different angle.
Email and Viral: A Natural Fit
Just about every desktop and Web email client has a forwarding button built into it. You can take advantage of that, and of the natural human desire to pass on information, if you develop a good "forward to a friend” program that makes it easy and safe for people to share your material.
With all the benefits forward-to-a-friend offers for email marketers, and relatively low risk, I'm amazed to see how few marketers use it, and use it well. A study EmailLabs did last year found forwarding was one of the business-builders marketers were least likely to include in their messages.
At the same time, however, be careful how you do it. As good and trustworthy as it is when used correctly, "forward to a friend" can come back to bite you if you set it up wrong or misuse the personal information shared with you.
'F2F:' Three Ways to Get It Right
A good viral-marketing program has three essential qualities: It's simple to do, it's trustworthy and it benefits both the talker and the "talkee.” Here are strategies that can either help you launch your program or elevate it out of the doldrums to become an essential business-builder for you.
1. It's simple to do. Sure, you can hope that your readers will forward your fabulous messages on their own, but it's better for you that they use your data-capture page to send the information. That way, it's easier for you to track forwards. You also know the forwarded content will arrive and render pretty much as you intend it. And, you can send a special version of your newsletter or sales offer that speaks directly to the new recipient.
Every bulk email message you send should have a link to the page on your Web site where you collect the data you need to process the forward. Obviously, transactional and subscriber-only messages would not merit encouragement to forward, but any other messages should.
Not only should you include a link to your data-capture page, you need to draw attention to it. Okay, maybe not with blinking animations but surely with a clear direction ("Share this information with a friend who appreciates a good bargain” for example).
You can use an image that links to your data-capture page, such as a button or tab with the desired action listed on it ("Forward to a friend here”), but make sure you include a descriptive alt tag that will be visible in case the friend has images disabled. You likely won't be included on their contact list, so your chances of having images disabled on the first pass is pretty high.
2. It's trustworthy. People are skittish enough about getting email they didn't request. You might see the data you collect from your readers as a vein of priceless information to mine as you wish, but in reality, it is only on loan for a one-time use. Abuse that trust, and you will not only alienate your potential new customers, you could lose the ones who trusted you with the information, and you could end up being roasted in public as a spammer.
Make sure your privacy policy states clearly what you will or will not do with the forwarding information your readers give you. The safest policy, and the one that third-party reputation certifiers look for, is not to reuse the information for any purpose unless you collect a subscription request.
Next, state your policy succinctly on the data-capture page to reassure your readers that they don't need to fear that you'll abuse the data. Then, create a special edition of the forwarded message that includes a reassurance to the recipients that their names and email addresses were used only to send the information at their friends' request, and that they will receive no other mailings from you unless they subscribe.
Finally, and this might be the hardest part, stick to that policy.
3. It creates a benefit for you. Ideally, everyone should benefit from the forward, but I'll focus on you and how you can get the most out of the forward without abusing the information you were given.
Most obviously, you should capture a conversion from the forward, however you define it: a sale, a download, a contest entry. At the very least, you should hope recipients sign up on their own for your mailing list or to get more information.
That's why it's so important to have a subscription link, or several, on your newsletters and landing pages throughout your site. When you assure the recipients they won't receive more messages from you unless they request them, follow that with a clearly labeled button or link to your subscription or registration page.
Don't wait too long to send out the forward. Your list-management software should send these out automatically, as soon as it gets the information.
CAN-SPAM Implications
The U.S. law regulating commercial email prohibits deceptive sender or "from” lines, especially if they're used to conceal the true sender.
Your heart might be in the right place if you put the forwarding friend's name or email address in the sender line to make the email look more legitimate or trustworthy. However, the email is launched from your database. You are the legal sender, not the friend, and using the friend's name instead of your own could be seen as deceptive or concealing the true sender.
This isn't a problem if you create an inbox presence that announces clearly that you are sending the email at their friend's request. The easiest way to accomplish this is to put your company, brand, product or newsletter name in the sender, or "from” line, and the friend's name in the subject line.
Example:
Sender line: XYZ Company. Subject line: Your friend Jane Doe wants you to read this.
Make sure the friend's name shows up early in the subject line so that it doesn't get cut off in the inbox.
What if the friend's name is already on your do-not-email list? Don't honor the forwarding request. Instead, set your list software to generate a message to the referring noting that you can't email that address and instead to forward the original message using their email client's forwarding button.
The Down Side of F2F
For all of its obvious benefits, forward-to-a-friend has a serious down side, resulting from failing to use it properly. Watch out for these potential traps:
1. Abusing the data you collect.
You might give yourself permission to use any data your readers give you, either on themselves or on the friends they forward information to, in any way you please, but it will come back to haunt you:
Your readers will hate you and will tell their friends why.
Here's the other side of the word-of-mouth coin. Abuse your readers' trust in any way, and they will tell their friends. The conventional wisdom is that bad word of mouth travels faster and farther than good word of mouth by a factor of 10. That's truer than ever in this world where people with an ax to grind will do it in public.
Vonage, the voice-over-Internet-protocol service provider, learned this recently when Andy Sernovitz, one of the leading proponents of online word-of-mouth, complained in his popular blog that his referrals were being spammed with messages that went way beyond the original request.
Sernovitz complained publicly, people listened to him, picked up his complaint and reposted it throughout the blogosphere. That resulted in a severe public roasting for Vonage, already deluged with bad publicity for service failures.
2. Failure to optimize your data collection:
You might miss out on an essential, low-cost and high-trust way to build your business and keep subscriptions growing if you don't take these basic steps: urge readers to forward your material, make it easy for their friends to sign up and then follow up with a great welcome program for the new additions to your list.
F2F: Terrific Up Side; But Mind the Down Side
An interesting sideline in this controversy outlines why you must be completely transparent when communicating with the people whose data your readers have turned over to you:
In the comments on Sernovitz's blog posting where he detailed his complaint against Vonage, responses took a surprising turn. Most of the commenters said Sernovitz was guilty himself of spamming his friends by turning over their data to the company without his permission. Understandably, many people will use their own email client's forward feature rather than any forms you provide, but you'll still need to include those subscription links in either case.
Don't let the down side of forward to a friend frighten you away from using this powerful tool to build your business. Just resist any urge to use the data you collect for anything but sending out the requested information.
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