Don’t assume your friends and colleagues are going to forward your emails. Sometimes, you have to ask them to do so. You already ask for your customers’ email addresses (right? I hope so!). So why hesitate to ask customers to pass along your valuable content as well…

Putting call-to-action pass-along messages in your email – not just at the bottom, but throughout your message – will help build referrals and grow your list. This is what referral marketing is all about.

Now, of course, your content has to be worth sharing.

There are a few ways to work the call-to-forward action into your content. First and easiest is the automatic forward-this-email link placed in the footer of every email you send via Constant Contact. You can easily override the generic text with a more tailored message of your own.

There are stock “Forward to a Friend” buttons available that you can insert into your messages.

Why bother using the forward links and not just have recipients click the Forward button in their email program? Links inside the email are trackable, with the results showing up in your reports. You can see who on your list forwarded the email and can get a better sense of what content is resonating with your fans. But, if a recipient forwards using their email program, your content is still passed along but you lose the tracking capability. You won’t be able to see who your email was forwarded to (as a matter of privacy), but there is a “Subscribe to this Newsletter” link at the top of any forwarded email as a way to virally grow your list.