A couple days ago, I read an interesting article called the death of the “Forward to a Friend”. It was about the waning usefulness of the “Email to a Friend” feature in email newsletters. This particular feature was pretty standard on websites back in the early days of the Internet where you attached this button to your website so that people can “email” a page to a friend. If you’re using a email service for your mailing list like Aweber, this is also a feature that’s pretty standard in email newsletters.
So why is this article calling for the death of “Forward to a Friend”? Well, as long this feature has been around, there are pretty serious flaws with it:
- It can be a multi-step process. Forwarding to a friend requires you to click a button, add some email addresses, and then click the button again. It can be a pain.
- There’s a trust issue. Most people don’t like sharing their own email addresses, much less the addresses of their friends.
With the popularity of social networking services, another type of sharing called “Share With Your Network” is becoming more popular with not only sharing web pages, but only things like email newsletters. The benefits of sharing your newsletter on Facebook or Twitter include:
- You reach more people at a time. Instead of subscribers forwarding your newsletter to just a handful of people at a time, sharing your newsletter on Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn potentially puts it in front of possibly hundreds of people.
- It’s easier to share. Sharing your newsletter on Facebook or Twitter requires you to only click on a button or two.
- It overcomes the trust issue. Since the subscriber isn’t sharing any information with anyone, then sharing your email newsletter on a social network seems “safer”.
While I don’t call for the death of the “Forward to Friend” feature on email newsletters, I do think it’s a good idea to include these features in your email newsletter and your email marketing. Even if you’re not on a social network yourself, you can still use them in order to help spread the news about your email newsletter. Here’s a few ideas:
1. Use an email service that has social networking features built in- Email list management list services like Aweber and Constant Contact gives you the ability to add social networking buttons to your email newsletters that makes it easy for your subscribers to share your newsletter on their favorite networks. If you’re trying to manage your email using a service that don’t have this feature, or even worse, you’re using your computer’s email program to manage your list, consider moving your list to one of these services.
2. Blog about your newsletter- One of the things I do to promote my newsletter is that I include an excerpt of my newsletter in a blog post. Each blog post includes buttons that allow people to tweet the post, share it on Facebook, LinkedIn, or StumbleUpon. The blog post is also automatically shared on my Facebook profile and Facebook page using an app called “NetworkedBlogs“.
3. Regularly link to and tweet about your newsletter- If you are on Twitter or Facebook or whatever, be sure to link to and share your newsletter sign up page on a regular basis. This will remind your older followers that you have a newsletter and let your new followers know that they need to subscribe.
I talked about more ways to integrate social networking with your email marketing a webinar I hosted earlier this month called, “Email List Building and Marketing Secrets “. If you missed the live webinar, you can still get the replay here.
Now your turn! Do you use social networking to help promote your email list? How do you do it? Leave a comment and share your ideas!
