The Death of Foward to A Friend
I’m officially declaring that the Forward to a Friend feature email service providers include in their application as the most stupid thing ever created. Yes, we at Gold Lasso are just as stupid for including it in eLoop. The simple fact is that since 100% of the most common used email clients have a forward email feature people use that instead. The Forward to a Friend gimmick is a failed attempt by email service providers to incorporate “viral” marketing tools into their applications. We tried to reinvent the wheel and we failed. The only thing we email service providers can do to save face is to hope that our Forward to a Friend feature reminds people to use their forward button.
I've been in the email marketing business for a while & I know how the internal tracking & stuff works. If I hit the Forward button on the email client, it will just forward the whole email with all the links personalized for my profile. Say for example, I fwd my email & my friend hits the unsubscribe button at the bottom of the email, it will Unsubscribe me !! where as the System generated F2F shouldn't & won't do that.
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You are correct! However you and three other people realize this and therefore use the forward to a friend. The rest of the world (judging by stats or lack thereof) don't care.
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According to Epsilon forward to a friend is having a some success. What are you basing you findings on.
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51% of respondents report having clicked "forward to a friend" links in marketing email, but 38% have never seen these links. - Epsilon (2007)
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Ryan,
Interesting stat! My findings are based on statistics from my clients and other people I have spoken to in the industry. Based on the information you provided, Epsilon is reporting people that "having clicked" but not necessarily use the function on a regular basis. I think the forward to a friend feature is great for websites but fairly worthless for email.
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I am a big fan of the Refer a Friend tool. The best part about it is the ability to track forwards, conversions and sale amounts of all new people your internal mailing list forwarded off to.
If done right, your forward to a friend function can surpass the results of your house email list.
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Good article! Clients love to ask for FTAF because in some ways it passes the buck. The viral potential is important, but we should focus on creating emails that are so valuable/funny/thought-provoking that users will forward the email using whatever means possible. My experience with having a FTAF link has been a .02% click rate on a newsletter that is both informative and has product specials. I believe, but can't verify, that it is much lower than the actual forwards.
People will tend to use their own forward button because it's what they're used to and they don't have to type in the friend's address. I also believe people are becoming more aware of web tracking and information gathering, so they are reluctant to type their friend's address into a website's form.
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