Forward to a Friend reporting updates

July 19, 2007

We've always had a very strict permission policy at Campaign Monitor with clear-cut rules about what does and doesn't constitute permission. There was however one piece of functionality which perhaps relaxed our high standards a little - forward to a friend reporting.

To date, we not only store which of your subscribers forward your email to a friend or colleague, we also told you exactly who they forwarded it to. We certainly didn't add these friends to a list or anything nasty like that, but we did expose their details nonetheless. To compound the problem, it wasn't crystal clear on the Forward to a Friend page that your friend's details were even being captured. Another slap on our wrists.

While we never had any negative incidents or complaints around this issue, it's clearly not best practice and we've gone ahead and stopped capturing exactly who forwards to who. Instead, you'll now see which subscribers forwarded your email and how many people they forwarded it to. This change has also been applied to any previous campaigns you've sent.

From personal experience, I know how interesting this data was, but individual's details were being exposed to the campaign sender without their permission. We need to put the privacy of these people first. If you're hoping to capture new subscribers via the Forward to a Friend feature, we recommend adding a prominent link in each email encouraging new subscribers to sign up, then link right to the subscribe form on your site.

Posted in: New Features & Updates

8 Comments

Chris
July 19, 2007 6:06am

Excellent attention to detail. Thanks for the update. Although it may make it harder for me to do my job, I will end up doing it better.

Thanks
Karl
July 19, 2007 10:47am

A bit of a pity… but probably for the best. But how about this… wouldn’t it be great if when you forwarded the email to a freind it forwarded a different design. We could design one to be sent to subscribers… and a slightly different design for those it’s forwarded to. It would allow us to use text like “you’ve been forwarded this email by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address). If you’d like to receive it yourself please subscribe here” and use different calls to action as required!
MikeR
July 19, 2007 6:22pm

A good choice indeed. It’s odd that we haven’t heard more about this from email pundits in the past (or perhaps I simply missed it). While the information is interesting and sometimes helpful, there’s risk involved with making it available to some customers. Ultimately, we don’t really need to know the details, just that the content engaged our readers enough to make them share it.
SR
July 19, 2007 11:18pm

This week was the first time my company was using the forward to a friend feature as an incentive for customers to receive a free gift if they used it and we would then obtain those new email addresses. What a very inopportune time for you to discontinue this feature.
We ending up sending out the small gift, but in the end, we gained nothing! I wish you would have sent out an email saying you were discontinuing this feature!!! We were very disappointed.
July 19, 2007 11:20pm

by the way…you still have this verbage on the “forward” report page: To find out who they forwarded the email to, click the ‘Who did they forward to?’ link.
Dave Greiner
July 20, 2007 12:21am

Chris, Carl and Mike, thanks for the understanding. I agree there’s more we can do to encourage the recipient of a forwarded email to subscribe, and we plan on doing more in that area soon.

SR, my apologies for springing this update on you, but we felt that if we gave ample warning about this, it would be too tempting to head into the reports and grab all these addresses for future use, even though correct permission had not been gained. Of course, you can still give a gift to anyone who forwards your email, we track and report on that for you, as well as how many people they forwarded it to. We’re only hiding who they’re forwarding to.
Jonathan Atkinson
July 20, 2007 4:54pm

And again this is another reason that campaign monitor is the best and only serious solution to bulk-send email campaigns to customers who have ASKED for your communication.

Wonderful stuff guys and gals - keep it up please!
Hrush
September 2, 2007 9:39am

Nice move, guys. I always saw this in our reports and while it was interesting data, it did seem to compromise privacy.

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