Transcript Forward-to-a-friend: Best Practices & Implementation October 17, 2008

Forward-to-a-friend
&
Refer-a-friend
October 17, 2008
Part I
Overview
A tactic of several names
• Forward-to-a-friend (F2F)
• Refer-a-friend (RaF)
• Share with a friend (more recent)
What is F2F?
• F2F is a tactic
• F2F is used to grow the membership of optin e-mail lists
Benefits of F2F done well
• Increased membership
• More metrics to analyze and use to gauge the
success of your communications; are people
willing to tell others?
• Increased conversions
• A conversion is typically considered a purchase
(e.g. enrolled in a CCE non-credit course or
purchasing a ticket to Northrop, Weisman, etc.)
What F2F isn’t [easily] for
• F2F isn’t suitable for opt-out lists, unless
you’re running opt-in and opt-out lists in
parallel
• That sort of opt-in/opt-out mixture adds a
burden to managing data
What F2F isn’t for at all
• Harvesting e-mail addresses for any
purpose
• Adding ‘friends’ to opt-out lists, or
subscribing them to opt-in lists, based on
what their friends do
F2F vs. RaF
• The idea behind F2F is that you’re
forwarding the same message to a friend
• RaF isn’t necessarily the same message,
rather it’s a sample of a mailing from the list,
not necessarily the same mailing
A basic outline of F2F
1. Send a blast
2. Recipients follow the link to forward-to-a-friend
and arrive at a web form
3. Recipients enter e-mail addresses of their
friends and submit the form
4. The friends receive a pre-selected piece of
content and an invitation to subscribe
5. Hopefully, they subscribe
Why not just forward as normal?
• Nothing is preventing recipients from
forwarding a message they receive to others
in their e-mail client
• While metrics of supposed forwards can be
obtained, it’s not a good measure due to the
implementation (next two slides)
• Links to a subscription center could be easily
added to messages
Tracking message forwards
• The U’s mass e-mail system, Lyris
ListManager, can track supposed forwards
• To track forwards, open tracking must be
enabled
• The first recorded open by a recipient is
logged, including the network address the
message was opened from
Tracking message forwards II
• Subsequent opens of the same message
from a different IP address are counted as
forwards (and opens)
• If you read a tracked message, and load
images, at your desk and then again later at
home, you’ve supposedly forwarded the
message
Measuring success
• At what rate do people refer friends?
• At what rate do referred friends subscribe?
• Are the referred friends clicking through, or
even opening, messages?
• Do referred friends keep their subscription
after one real issue? Two?
• See part IV
The spam problem
• Abuse of referral forms and open text fields
• People who are referred report the U as a
spammer, not their friend
Part II
What Lyris ListManager Offers
Lyris does refer-a-friend
• Lyris offers refer-a-friend functionality
• You select a sample issue and customize it
for those who are referred
• There isn’t a quick way to setup a F2F link to
forward the current message
F2F is possible
• With additional time for every mailing you
could mimic forward-to-a-friend
• But should you?
– It’s time and money
– Are you getting a measurable, good increase in
subscribers, engagement, ‘conversions’, etc?
– ROI
The default referral form from Lyris
No particularly interesting, not branded for the U, just functional.
How can the form be improved?
• Brand it!
• Make it appear as a part of your Web site,
even though it’s not
• UThink blogs are sometimes used this way
• Why wouldn’t you want to drive traffic to your
Web site?
The default referral e-mail
Note the From field, the Subject field, and the lead-in message.
How can we improve the e-mail?
• Use a good sample issue
• Provide a lead-in message that explains why
you’re receiving the message, in your words,
and a clear option to subscribe
• Repeat the subscribe option at the end of the
message
• Assure the recipient that you won’t use their email address for other purposes
• Use a Web page for subscriptions, not e-mail
The referred state
• Lyris has member type ‘referred’
• Those who are referred are automatically
added as a list member with this state
• This state prevents duplication of referral invites
and doesn’t include the member in other
message sends
• Members in this state can be automatically
purged after a set period
Part III
Implementing Refer-a-friend
for Today’s News Headlines
Adding RaF to an existing pub.
• We are adding refer-a-friend to Today’s
News Headlines
• Today’s News is a daily e-mail and Web
page
• http://www1.umn.edu/urelate/newsservice/to
daysnews/tnarchive-2008/tn-20081014.html
Today’s News Headlines Web page
Today’s News Headlines e-mail
Today’s News Headlines e-mail footer
Today’s News Headlines subscribe form
A subscription for already exists
http://www1.umn.edu/urelate/newsservice/subscribe-tn.html
What we had to do
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•
•
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•
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Make a better referral form
Provide a thank you page for referrers
Pick an issue for the sample
Update the sample content
Update our template
Test it all
Referral form I
• The referral form is hosted on the Lyris
server
• We created a new referral form from the
default template
• Utilities->Web Forms->Referral Forms
• Create From Template
• Use “Referral Form Template”
Referral form II
We gave the referral form a useful name and left the code as is.
Referral form III
• We copied code from one of our News Service
web pages and merged the referral form into it
• Links to other page, image references, CSS
references, etc. needed updating due to the
different host
• Tweaks to Lyris default code for better
adherence to the doctype
• Stripped out Google Analytics code
Thank you page
We added a very basic thank you/confirmation page to the site.
Sample content
• We picked our sample issue and made a copy of the
content
• We created a sample invitation from the built-in invitation
template to get at the code (switch to built-in templates
while in View Templates to get to this)
• We updated the sample issue using code from the
default invitation to get at the code to use for the From
and Subject lines, and any message the referrer provided
• We added the option to subscribe using the web form
near the top and bottom of the message, and some text
• We removed the option to unsubscribe
Invitation/sample content headers
Invitation/sample content HTML version
Updating the standard template
• Our current recipients need to find the option
to refer-a-friend somewhere
• We added this to the footer in the HTML and
text parts
• Q: Do we make the refer-a-friend option
more pronounced for one or several issues,
rather than just burying it in the footer?
Testing the implementation
• We want to test using the actual list, but
don’t want a random recipient since we need
to test the “send me a copy” and don’t want
to copy a random list member
• We created a segment to select just the
tester
And now we walk through it
Part IV
Metrics, Analysis, and More
Sorry, this is for next month
• Some real metrics and whatever we can dig
up from others
• Clarifications on best practices?
• Better implementations?