What is “Forward to a friend” and why does it matter in my marketing emails?
Note: As of right now, the Forward-to-a-friend feature is currently only available in Outbound Marketing. Check back for updated information for Real-Time Marketing when Microsoft rolls out this feature to the rest of the Marketing suite.
When you send a marketing email, obviously you care about the data insights after the campaign—the deliveries, opens, clicks. Not only do you want to measure the value that your content delivers, but you want to know which of your recipients are most likely to interact with your content as well. And what if your recipient finds your email so valuable that they want some of their own contacts to receive it, too?
If your recipients forward any of your marketing emails on, a standard forward in Outlook or Gmail doesn’t capture any data insights, so your delivery rates, open rates, clicks, and overall interactions are technically a bit inaccurate. Obviously, it would be great to track not only the extra open and interaction metrics, but to also know which of your recipients sent your email on. Luckily for you, there’s a pretty easy way to track this information when you send email campaigns with Dynamics 365.
Beyond the analytics benefit to you as a marketer, the new recipient will benefit as well. If you’ve ever received a forwarded email where the spacing was visibly off, that’s probably a result of resending that HTML/CSS designed email, causing some glitching. Using forward-to-a-friend ensures that the email layout and spacing is retained.
Likewise, in a typical email forward, any dynamic content—such as the recipient’s first name in the greeting of an email that was pulled from your CRM database—will not change. But, with forward-to-a-friend, that greeting can pull a new name from the “forward-to-a-friend” form so that dynamic content reflects the new recipient.
Cool, right? Let’s cover the basics of getting started with forward-to-a-friend.
Setting it up
There’s a specific form type to create this “Forward-to-a-friend” form. In the Marketing Form page, select +New to create a new form, and in the top right corner, click on the Status Reason dropdown menu. Here, you’ll select the “Forward to a friend” form type, and a very simple form will populate: one field asking for the recipient’s name, another asking for an email, and a submit button.
A simple “forward to a friend” form consists of a name field, email field, and submit button.
You can adjust and add elements to the form via the editing panel on the right of the screen. For instance, you can check yes or no to the “Ask for friend’s name” field depending on your preference, adjust how many people can be forwarded to at a time (up to six), and you can add labels to the name and email fields.
You can also change the layout by adding additional columns and you can add elements like text fields, images, dividers, buttons, and content blocks. You can also add some of the advanced form elements like a reset button or a Captcha. You can go into the form’s HTML and make additional styling changes, as well.
Once you’re done customizing your form, be sure to check it for errors and go live with it. If this is your first time setting up a Forward-to-a-friend form, you’ll also have to accept some cookie tracking and consent terms.
Form hosting, Marketing pages, and Content settings
Anytime you create a new form in Dynamics 365 Marketing, you’ll want to ensure that the form is accessible and usable across various mediums and hosting methods.
If you want to add your form to an external webpage, say your business’ website, you can create a form hosting page, which generates a code snippet you’ll use to embed the form whereever you want it.
But if you don’t want a form hosted externally, you can create a Marketing Page in Dynamics 365 Marketing, which will generate a custom URL housed in Dynamics that you can link to. This is the method you’ll want to choose for a forward-to-a-friend form, since you likely will not embed this form into a website.
Creating this marketing page is the same process you’d follow to create any other marketing page. You’ll add a form element and select “forward to a friend,’ design it as you wish, and then go live with it. Don’t forget that marketing pages allow you to customize your partial URL, so name this one something like “forward-to-a-friend” for continuity.
An example of a simple marketing page to host the forward to a friend form.
Next, you’ll need to link this page to the “Forward to a friend” field in your Content settings. Content settings is the area where you establish important company details, like your address, social media links, the subscription center where your audience can adjust their email preferences, and your “Forward to a friend” URL.
You can access the Content settings in the lefthand panel under “Marketing templates” and look for the “Forward to a friend” field.
Content settings are found under "Marketing templates" in the lefthand navigation.
Select the curly bracket in the “Forward to a friend” field in Content settings to link your marketing page.
There are two ways you can link this page to the Content Settings. The first, which we recommend, is to use Dynamic Content. Select the {curly brackets} to add Personalization. You’ll recognize the “Content assist” window if you’ve ever entered dynamic content into an email. Here’s what you’ll select:
Static content → Marketing Page → No relationship → Forward-to-a-friend → Insert
To properly add the “Forward to a friend” marketing page to Content settings via Personalization (aka dynamic content), select Static content > Marketing page > No relationship > Forward to a Friend.
The other way to add your “Forward to a friend” Marketing page into this field is to use the page’s URL, which we mentioned before. This can be found in the Summary tab.
After you link that marketing page in Content settings, you can use it in your emails!
Adding “Forward to a friend” to your emails
In your marketing email, you'll need to decide where to include this “Forward to a friend” link, and what the language will be. Something as simple as “Forward this email to a friend” in the footer of your email works. Select that text and click the link button in the Text Tool Bar at the top of your email. In the URL field, instead of pasting a link in, you’ll instead select the curly brackets to add Dynamic Content. From there, you’ll select:
Dynamic Content → ContentSettings → No relationship → Forward-to-a-friend field → Insert
To properly add the “Forward to a friend” from your Content settings into an email via Personalization (aka dynamic content): select Static content > Marketing page > No relationship > Forward to a Friend.
That has now linked this Forward-to-a-friend form page as a hyperlink in your email! It’ll be a clickable link just like anything else in your email, which means you can track when people click it.
Tracking forwards
In Outbound Marketing, the forward-to-a-friend form will generate new links and redirects for each forwarded message, meaning that it can separately capture the interactions from forwarded emails as well as your standard campaign emails. Plus, Dynamic Content will capture the name of the new recipient, so you don’t have to worry about them receiving any content that was personalized for the initial recipient.
Within any of your marketing emails, the Insights tab will show you email-specific metrics like sends, bounces, and interactions. Within this dashboard, there’s a tile that will show you the number of forwards your email received, and the activity timeline will show you which contact forwarded your email.
Note that these insights are email specific, so if this email is part of multiple customer journeys, insights for this email from all the journeys will be shown.
One important thing to keep in mind is that all data entered into any of your forward-to-a-friend forms are deleted after 30 days. That means that forward-to-a-friend forms cannot and will not create new lead or contact records on their own, but if these new recipients happen to fill out another form or landing page, then they will create new records for you.
There are a lot of reasons why you may choose to add a “forward to a friend” link in your emails. For starters, it’s easy to set up and even easier to add to your emails after initial setup. The link doesn’t take up much space and can be discretely added to your email footer, or wherever else you want it to go. And, of course, there’s the obvious thing: your email reaches more people. Speaking of, this feature benefits your new audience – they get personalized emails with no formatting errors that can arise from a normal forward that can hinder readability. And then there’s the data analytics you’ll get from these forwards that you wouldn’t have gotten otherwise. We hope you’ll try this out and use it if it will benefit your marketing endeavors!