ability to add a forward to friend in emails

[MelanieM34]

I created an email using card/announcement and when I tried to add "forward to a friend", "join my mailing list" and permission reminder" I was not able. I would like to have the ability to use these functions in future emails that I create.

[MelanieM34]

Hi everyone! I am following up to the forward to friend feature request. Thank you for your patience as we looked into this! The good news is we have received word from our engineers that feature is now available in our cross device templates under the social share block. If anyone has any additional questions on this, please don’t hesitate to respond to this post as we would be happy to assist you further.

[PeterD18977]

Are you looking to have this feature back? I would love to use it too. That would help our campaigns.
Many thanks,
Laura

[Frankie_P]

Hi @PeterD18977

We are looking to collect feedback from customers on this feature. So thank you for sharing your feedback on this here in the Community. We have submitted this feature request in your account to our Product Team. Please let us know if there is anything else we can help with in the meantime.

[AlexE63]

A forward to friend feature (and the ability for that friend to subscribe to our email list) would be essential. Is this something that Constant Contact is actually going to work on and release in the near future OR is it still just being discussed with the development team (as it has been for like the past year). 

 seems to have a forward to friend feature... may have to move over to them if Constant Contact doesn't implement this extremely useful feature. 

[Frankie_P]

Hi @AlexE63

Thank you for sharing your feedback on this! A feature like this is being reviewed, however it was not a highly used feature in our Second Generation Editor. In the meantime we have tracked in your account that you are looking for it as well.

[dorism11]

With all due respect, I have a hard time believing that Forward to a Friend was not highly used. Every other platform similar to CC has that. If it wasn't popular, they also would have eliminated it. CC's customers have been begging for it for at least a year. As a business owner, the ongoing requests (begging, actually) should be honored. I am not a software developer but am assured that it would not be a difficult option to add in. If people don't want to use it, it would be their choice. Those of us who want it should have that choice. Again, as a loyal customer.

[Caitlin_M]

Hi @dorism11. You noted earlier that you had concerns about contacts being unsubscribed when forwarding an email to a friend. It's a very valid point and I did want to mention that. Although we do not have a workaround to prevent the unsubscribe from happening, there is a message that appears when someone clicks the Unsubscribe link that states "If this isn't your email address you haven't been added to any mailing lists and there is no need to unsubscribe." The original contact's email address appears above the message as well so it is clear that the receiving contact has not been added to any mailing lists. This was put in place to alleviate any confusion when an email is forwarded. 

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[dorism11]

In reality, someone who receives an email from an unknown source and possibly considering it to be spam, isn't going to bother to stop and look at that. They're just going to hit Unsubscribe. It's a nice thought but it's not a viable workaround.

[Zoe_H]

Hello @dorism11,

We do completely understand where you are coming from, and even though someone might skip past that message and click unsubscribe anyways, we did put it there to try and prevent that as much as possible. We do apologize for the inconvenience this is causing, and we are submitting your feedback over to our engineers for review. Thank you and have a wonderful Sunday! 

[Yayoe]

I think one reason CC thinks the feature was underutilized is that... people don’t utilize it enough. They just go ahead and forward. But that’s something to deal with through better UI design, not be dropping it.

By not including the forward to friend feature, and by not providing a different tracking method, CC totally underestimated the power of word-of-mouth and direct recommendation, which are the most valuable marketing available to any company or service.

[rcppubs23]

I think this is probably true, and you can see why a person might be reluctant to forward when they have to bring in the address(es) of people they want to forward it to individually, enter them in separate fields that may or may not be the way they can easily copy/paste from their email client, etc.

On the other hand, at least one of the other ESPs (and I suspect more than one) who continue to offer this feature, only send a LINK to the online version of the email rather than forwarding the ACTUAL email. This is why the way Constant Contact was doing it in the 2nd gen editor was better than some of the others. I sincerely hope that if they DO bring this feature back they do it the way it was before, where the ACTUAL email is forwarded.