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Marketing Consultant at Independent
02 November 2006 10:50am
Lets assume my site has "tell a friend" email functionality whereby casual users, call them referrers, inform others of my xyz product.
One of my aims as a site owner is to increase on site membership registration.
If a site visitor uses the "tell a friend" basic form to email another user, is it fair play for me as a site owner, to campaign email those referrers with an incentive for them to become registered members.
Do other site owners practice this or are these forms regarded as off limits and more a courtesy tool for site visitors.
Is "tell a friend" outdated or used to any significant degree anyway?
E-Business Consultant at Dan Barker
02 November 2006 12:45pm
I'll take the questions in reverse order:
A) 'Is tell a friend outdated'
no - if you do it right, it works very well. If your content is 'share-worthy' (or incentivised to be shared) & you place your tell a friend links in the right place, it still works. One of the reasons Youtube grew so fast was that they made it so easy to share videos & put the 'share this' message in exactly the right place: when the video ends & there's nothing else to do, the main focus is 'share this'.
B) 'is it fair play to campaign email those referrers'
Do you mean referrers or referrals? either way I would say that it's fair to send both parties a single email as a result of the 'tell a friend'. You could include a secondary action point in those emails, urging them to sign up for membership (or to opt in to further email messages), but I would not send them more than one email, as they haven't given you permission to do so.
Managing Director at Shine Marketing
03 November 2006 10:52am
The Data Protection Registrar issued guidelines on this a few years back when these functions first became popular.
You can send the referal email from a friend, it's no different in principle from them sending an email from their own account. However as the referred person hasn't given permission for you to process their data you shouldn't even be storing their address, yet alone emailing them again.
The reality is that referrals are often tracked back to their originator for some sort of reward, so it may be necessary to hold some data for a period of time, but no, you shouldn't email it again until they've come and opted into your list themselves.
As an alternative you may be better sending a reminder to the original referer to see if they can remind thier friend?
No, refer a friend isn't outdated, but like Daniel says, put it at a 'dead-end' where the user has just received something of value from you and you'll get a much better response.
CEO at Sensorpro.net
04 November 2006 13:12pm
Most good email systems will have a function where the "tell a friend" is reminded that they were referred by their friend and to indicate their preference to continue mailings in the future. www.spinnakerpro.co.ok is a good example.
E-Business Consultant at Dan Barker
08 November 2006 11:36am
I've just read through quite a good report on 'tell a friend' that came out last week. I thought I'd post a link to it here in case others are interested:
http://retailemailreports.blogspot.com/2006/11/send-to-friend-benchmark-study.html
Marketing Consultant at Independent
08 November 2006 12:32pm
the study is quite revealing, i was pretty shocked at :
Many major retailers also squandered the opportunity that STAF gives them to sign up the recipient of the forward, with only 44% of retailers including a newsletter subscribe link at the top of the forwarded email.
However it doesn´t really shed any light on my original question as to if siteowners proactively increase member registrations by emailing the referrers?
In due course I´ll share my findings here.
Founder at Resourceguruapp.com and StagsandHens.com
26 November 2006 12:52pm
As far as I know, you would not be allowed to "campaign email" the referrers (people who emailed their friends). Firstly, I think it's inadvisable to store their email addresses (for your campaign email) without their explicit consent. And secondly, unless they had opted in to your campaign email, I think you would technically be sending SPAM because they hadn't explicitly opted in to your email.
Have you thought about offering your incentive to register on the 'thank you' page after the 'tell a friend' email has been sent? Alternatively, you could include an opt-in check box on your form so that people can choose to receive further communications from you.
On 10:50:10 2 November 2006 PaulAlburquerque wrote: