Follow on to contacting a contact list

Unsolicited emails

The emails sent out are targeted but they are also unsolicited. With the problems surrounding spam this is a potential issue. There are a few steps which can be taken to minimise any problems arising from this

• Be upfront about why you are sending them an email.
• Prevent multiple emails being sent to the same person about the same thing.
• Allow the recipient to exclude themselves from future messages.

Improving Performance

The purpose of this tool is to get more people to visit/sign-up at your site. Allowing existing visitors to send an email to their contacts enables you to advertise your site to a targeted audience. A group of friends are more likely to be interested in the same sort of things than a group of strangers. As such this is probably already quite an efficient tool in gaining visitors. The challenge is in making it even better and a few ideas in achieving this are

• Monitor performance, you need to know how many people visit your site through clicking links in these emails
• Allow split testing. By sending one of two emails out to each email address at random and then monitoring which results in most visitors will allow you to continually improve the emails you send out.
• Investigate the effect of a custom landing page, perhaps with a special welcome note from the original visitor whose contact list you used.
• Follow up emails. If the first email doesn’t succeed you can consider sending a second email to remind the contact.
• If you use follow up emails you could record how many new visitors/members you get from each contact list and include this number in the follow up emails.