How often do we see stuff like ‘Send this page to a friend’ on a webpages? Well, I see them quite often.
My question is, how do you guys see it’s effectiveness? If I hit a webpage that’s interesting, and I think my friend would enjoy it, I can just copy the URL from my browser bar, paste it into the email and press ‘Send’ button. In my opinion, it’s usually faster and less mistake-aware then the button/link like this on the webpage. In addition, I’m not really sure what this website does with the emails I enter there – don’t they store it and then sell for $1/100 addresses to spammers?
My question is – when you design a website, do you put such links on the pages (it’s often seen on sites with some news/articles)? Does it even make sense?
The tell-a-friend button has a number of uses that are not so obvious.
From the users perspective: A tell a friend button will remind a user to tell a friend when they may not have thought of it themselves, which increases referrals. As part of the page, it’s much more noticeable.
It also removes technical questions like knowing how to paste or email the link, having their local email set up properly, being on their own computer with email access, etc.
From the webmaster perspective:
Some sites just send the email. Others can do a lot more some legal and ethical, some not so much.
For the owner of the website, since the referrals go through their server, it allows (if they so choose) referrals to be tracked. They can see what pages are being sent, how often, and which are most popular.
They might also track other info, which lets them run contests, potentially see what people are saying about their pages, etc.
They may track email addresses, which could give them marketing data – for instance if they see that a lot of people are sharing that have addresses at aol.com, they may decide to advertise more with aol.
Referrals can also be incentivised, contests run, etc.