Recommend a friend

Encouraging people sign up their friends to receive emails

[Screamer]

Hi

I'm uk based and wanted to know if anyone has any experience of inviting people to subscribe to a newsletter and giving them the opportunity to also include email addresses of friends etc who they feel might also be interested in receiving emails.

It doesn't sound like good practice to me... Has anyone got any thoughts on this?

Screamer

[graywolf]

I think signing someone else up is a bad idea, sending someone else and invitation to so sign up is a good idea.

[bird]

Graywolf is exactly right. Signing up other people results in SPAM. Inviting friends can be a good idea, but you need to make sure that the script doing this can't be abused by other people.

[Screamer]

Graywolf & Bird - Many thanks for your responses.

Graywolf - an invitation to sign up...good idea.

Bird - 'make sure that the script doing this can't be abused by other people'....how would someone potentially abuse this?

Screamer

[Tony_Perry]

it is a bad idea. instead invite them to send details themselves to their friends and if they are interested then they can join.

[hannamyluv]

We encourge people when they sign up to send an invitation to a friend. Then an email is sent to their friend with the invitee's email address in the from line. It basically says - I thought you might like this newsletter. If you would like to sign up, click here. Then the invited person can sign up if they would like. We have never had a complaint doing it that way.

But, on the flip side, that particular thing doesn't really see a lot of action. We get very few people who invite and even fewer who sign up because of it.

[bird]

Bird - 'make sure that the script doing this can't be abused by other people'....how would someone potentially abuse this?

If the script isn't written correctly, then a third party might be able to send spam from your address. Thousands of outdated formmail.pl installations out there continuously illustrate this problem. Of course, even a correctly written script could be used to flood someone with messages, but this is relatively rare in practise.