Hi, I'm working on my web site and am new to certain marketing tools. I'm working on a tools page where my members can go to promote the site. I want to add a "tell a friend" feature where the members can tell 5-10 people they know by adding their name & e-mail in a box and hit send with a pre-written message including the link to my site. Does that type of feature require some sort of script or is it just a certain HTML code? Thanks ahead of time for any input.
Your going to need to write some sort of script for you to be able to do this, or find a pre-written script Here are some scripts to get you started: Free: http://hotscripts.com/Detailed/62806.html http://hotscripts.com/Detailed/58126.html http://hotscripts.com/Detailed/46959.html Commercial: http://hotscripts.com/Detailed/49457.html I foudn these searching hotscripts.com, spend some time searching there and you should find one that will work for you. The search term i used was "Simple tell a friend"..
Yahoo has a freely available tool to do this, check out: http://publisher.yahoo.com/social_media_tools/
it's surprising to see that there are no yahoo ads on those tools... I think he wants to send a message along with the link though the yahoo tool does open your email editor and then you could add the message yourself. (assuming most of your users actually have a configured email client_
Are tell-a-friend scripts still popular? If you let visitors add a comment then they can use your site to spam their product. Even without a comment section sendmail scripts are susceptible to hacking and hijacking. More importantly, from a recipient's perspective, I don't like "friends" giving out my email address to websites without my permission.
That's what I like about Yahoo's solution. It simply opens up the user's own email to compose a message. It's not susceptible to hacking at all, and the user doesn't need to worry about privacy.
I don't think that's a problem, most users would have Outlook Express or Outlook, so it will be automatically configured. Any other email client they have will most likely configure itself as well.
Yes, Yahoo's solution also is not operating system/server specific (only uses client side javascript) and can work on any site.
Be careful with a tell-a-friend feature. Some spammers use this feature in order to spend spam to other. Typically, they would add their spam text to the optional message that get sent with the tell-a-friend. The spam will originate from your email server and might get you in trouble.
I use this: http://www.opt-media.com/index.php I turn off the ads becuase I really just need the script. I usually get one or two clicks to my site from it each day. free traffic.
Like the people above said, be careful that you dont have anyone abusing your tell a friend. Maybe you could find one that prevented users from sending more than the 5-10 emails?
If you really want tell-a-friend then the Yahoo approach is the way to go. But those scripts usually open the wrong client for me. Outlook and not my default Thunderbird.