New Feature: Forward to a Friend
Posted by David Greiner on February 23, 2005
Today we have launched the much requested ability to easily add forward to a friend links to your campaigns. These links encourage your recipients to pass your campaign along to other friends and colleagues.
When a recipient clicks your forward to a friend link, they are taken to a simple page where they can specify the names and email addresses of up to 5 friends at a time to send your campaign to. This page is non-branded and located at our forwardtomyfriend.com domain.
The best part is, you can track how many people are forwarding your campaign and who they're forwarding it to from your campaign reports.
How to do it?
Adding a forward to a friend link is as simple as adding the following tag to the content of your campaign:
HTML emails
<forwardtoafriend>your link text or image here</forwardtoafriend>
Text emails
[forwardtoafriend]
When your campaign is sent, these links will automatically be converted into a custom forward to a friend link when you import your campaign content.
How do I measure these forwards?
If you send a campaign with a forward to a friend link, a Forward to a Friend Activity Report is available in your campaign reports. This report, picture below, lists all the recipients that forwarded your email, as well as who they forwarded it to.
Please note that this report will only be available after a recipient forwards your campaign.
8 comments so far
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Dan Wavell
wrote on March 4, 2005 02:32 AM
Is there anyway to have a form for the forward to a friend that can be implemented on a page on our (or a clients) website rather than people going to forwardtoafriend.com
Cheers
Dave Greiner
wrote on March 4, 2005 11:46 AM
Hey Dan,
We avoided letting you guys host your own forward to a friend page for a couple of reasons:
1) Because we need server side code on the page (to check valid email addresses, display confirmation mesages, etc), we'd have to sacrifice the usability of the form
2) You'd end up with something that's quite messy to implement.
Another option would be to give you branding control over the page, so you can upload a client's logo and have a little more control over the colour scheme.
Would that be a happy medium?
Jason Grant
wrote on March 7, 2005 02:30 PM
Dave, any options for customization would be great. Providing a seamless user experience is very important to me. If the subscriber believes they've clicked off to a 3rd party site, they may lose interest in referring friends. Let us know what you come up with!
Dan
wrote on March 10, 2005 01:44 AM
Hi Dave,
I guess the branding option is a good idea, however it would still say forwardtoafriend.com. Would it work if the link from the email to the user to a framed page on the clients url which only had a main frame which loaded in the forward page from forwardtoafriend.com?
Eileen Foster
wrote on March 10, 2005 04:21 AM
It'd be nice to host the forwarding page at a client's URL. However, the customization option is a good compromise (or interim solution).
The referrals are worth compromising a bit on URL control. If the page looks similar to the subscribe/unscribe pages of the site..I'd say many users won't notice the forwardtofriends address.
Hope the customization option is offered soon. Keep us posted.
Dave Greiner
wrote on March 10, 2005 03:45 PM
Hey guys, just a quick update.
On further investigation, we realised that in order to ensure the built in tracking functions as proposed, you guys can't host the pages on your own servers. There is one workaround, but it means JavaScript has to be turned on and may not work in all browsers. All in all, not a pretty picture.
We're going to be adding the ability to customize this page on a per client basis real soon, so stay posted. I'll add a note about it in the blog as soon as it's online.
Jason
wrote on March 26, 2005 05:58 PM
I can't seem to get this URL to work. I'd love to see the page to determine if I can use this functionality. Any insight?
In addition, the tag uses "forwardtoAfriend" whereas the URL specified above is "forwardtoMYfriend.com". Just thought I'd point that out...
Ben Richardson
wrote on March 30, 2005 03:41 PM
Hey Jason,
If you create a new campaign with the tag you will be able to view the Forward to a Friend page through the campaign preview facility. Unfortunately there isn't currently a way to go straight to the page without a campaign since it's customized for your campaign (the subject line is used).
Excellent point about the tag being different to the URL. We will look at making it so both tags are compatible.
Got anything to add?