How to get more people to forward your email

Many ESP’s offer a function to forward the email to a friend and report on the number that did so. I always include a ‘forward to a friend’ option on my promotional emails, but decided to experiment and see if I could increase the number of forwards by amending the creative.

I usually place a forward to a friend button in the top right hand corner of the email, up in a prominent area in the header.

I did a split test: One mailing using its usual position, the second mailing using the usual position and a dedicated section in the email body...

The above screen grab shows how I made the forward more of feature, and it did increase the number of forwards.

RESULTS (% of opens that used the forward feature):
Standard forward (button in header) - 0.07%
Feature forward (button in header + dedicated section) - 0.17% 


The feature forward had a 61.7% increase in the number of people that forwarded it.