Last week two different clients asked me about the best practice of using forward to a friend from a web page.  I am not sure that it ever went away but it would seem that FTAF is making a comeback.  So, what is the best practice for sending web content through an FTAF facility?

The first thing to consider is how the email will be recieved by the reader.  This is important because many of the best practices for web site FTAF seem a but belt and braces.  These emails will come from the friend and not from you but when was the last time a friend sent you a full on HTML email?  Unless you have some pretty geeky friends, probably never.  So when the friend intiates the sending of content from your website, make sure that the senders name is not only in the from name but also in the subject line of the first part of the body copy.  One way to get it into the body copy is to allow the sender to input a personal message.

In addition to the above, you should also add a check to you system to prevent abuse.  If your site does not require a log-in, it could be used to send emails maliciously.  In order to prevent this you could add security feature that would thwart a bot written to generate the malicious emails.  Alternatively, you could limit the number of emails that can go to the same email address in any given day.

Lastly it should go without saying that all normal email best practices apply.

I have never been convinced that FTAF is a good way to drive list growth, but it would seem to be getting some interest from clients.  I would love to see a case study from any company that made it work.