The Messaging Times

Any email marketer would like to think that recipients find their message compelling enough to forward on to friends, family and colleagues. If you ever see an email marketer gazing out of a window with a grin on her face, there is a chance that she is having a daydream about her next campaign going viral – spreading from person to person and taking the Internet by storm. Hey it happens for silly videos, why not email? The fact is, some email does become viral.

Sometimes, getting someone to spread the word simply entails asking them to do so – “Hey, if you like this message, forward it on to your family, friends or colleagues.” For the recipient, it is probably easiest to use the Forward button in their email client and select or add the recipients they want to forward a message to. Unfortunately for marketers, this method of forwarding isn’t traceable (and marketers love to track things.) Forwarding a message in this way also causes problems with the formatting of HTML at times. So the message might lose its allure each time it is forwarded.

The other two ways to use FTAF is to either embed an FTAF form into the body of your email message or link to a form on your website. These methods require that your recipients take the time to fill out a short form and remember the email addresses of the people they want to send the message to. But, you can track these types of messages and formatting will remain in tact.

According to a Retail Email Send to a Friend (STAF) Benchmark Study conducted at the end of 2006, only 8 percent of retail email marketers used embedded FTAF forms. Probably because forms can be clunky in email – and might not even render at all in some email clients. Even more likely, many marketers simply just don’t know how to embed a form into an email message.

Linking recipients to a form on a website assumes that they are interested enough to take those extra steps to follow a link to their website and then fill out a form so that some marketer’s message can be delivered to more people. Some marketers use incentives to entice recipients to take those extra steps.

But the best strategy of all has nothing to do with the placement of forms. It has to do with content. If you create content that stirs emotions, causes laughter or inspires recipients in some practical or meaningful way; they will probably want to share it with others in their life.