Your Friend Thinks You’ll Like This

Word of mouth endorsement is still the holy grail of marketing. We trust our friends and with the explosion of social networks it's now easier than ever to reach out and ask our trusted circle what works and what doesn't.

For a marketer, cracking into this inner circle and getting a positive endorsement is a serious challenge though. So we set out to tackle this challenge with one of the most proven marketing channels, email.

Overview
Over the past six months we've been building and testing a Tell-A-Friend (TAF) feature on several clients' websites across industries like publishing, daily deals, and daily emails.

It's intentionally simple, we add a little snippet of code to a website and it creates a form allowing visitors to tell their friends about our client's service, business or product, via email. We'll have more info about our TAF platform in the near future but for now we just wanted to share some numbers we've been tracking.

Results
Since the launch of our TAF platform thousands of people have sent tens of thousands of recommendations to their friends. On average each person is recommending/inviting 3 to 4 of their friends.

Talk about viral.

And it's been amazingly effective:

• Nearly 40% of our TAF emails sent to friends get opened. Compared to typical email newsletter open rates of 20% - 30% this is pretty impressive.
• Even better, 30% of the people who open emails return to the recommended website. They actually visit the site to see what their friend is recommending.
• In other terms, for every 1,000 TAF emails sent about 400 people open the email and more than 130 of those people actually go to the recommended site.

Subject Line Testing: Surprising Initial Results
We've also been testing various subject line formats to find what works best. One format we've tested is using the friend's name in the subject line. Ex: "Your friend likes Digital Wax Works and thinks you will too!" vs. "Your friend Brett likes Digital Wax Works and thinks you will too!".

Our guess was that emails including a friend's name in the subject line would seem more personal and result in higher open rates.

The data says otherwise however:

• Open rates for emails containing a person's name are 34%, compared to 42% for emails without a person's name.
• The click-thru rate, at 30%, remains the same.
• Looks like we need to head back to the drawing board for some new subject line ideas.

We're currently testing our TAF platform on several client's sites and are looking for several more beta testers. If you're interested shoot us an email.

Your friend thinks you'll like it.