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Since trade show attendees are always looking to win something or get something for free, an incentive such as a prize usually works best. The trick is to balance volume with quality. This begins with choosing trade shows that are likely to have high-quality prospects. But, beyond that, you can further segment the crowd by offering several newsletter checkboxes on the sign-up card. Also take care in choosing your prize. Everyone is going to sign up to win the hot consumer gadget of the week. That’s probably not helpful. Instead, identify the prize that will quicken the pulse of your target prospects — and be completely uninteresting to everyone else. And, of course, have a sign posted that clearly states that submission of a business card serves as permission to be sent e-mail!

*Call center, direct mail, advertising and more—Operators working in your call center should be asking for e-mail as part of their call center script. There should be a short benefit statement to read, letting people know why they should sign up. And the operators need to be trained to take down an e-mail address with the proper format. Alert your customers to watch for a welcome e-mail within a few hours (or the fastest time-frame you can manage). The first e-mail should reference the fact that the sign-up was via the call center.

Direct mail, including catalogs, should also have a call to action, asking people for their e-mail and explaining the benefits they will receive from your newsletter, such as great shopping tips or inside information on the hottest new home decorating trends. In fact, anything you send to customers or prospects by mail, including products and promotional items, should include a card that promotes your newsletters and asks for their e-mail address.

*Using Forward to a Friend (FTAF) in E-mail—Viral marketing is a terrific way to get your content distributed to an even wider audience and ultimately built your list. After all, what could be better than having your customers do your marketing for you? It’s an idea that has been around for a long time — word-of-mouth. It’s a primary factor in keeping books on the bestseller list, restaurants crowded on a nightly basis and movies popular long after the initial box office blitz.

E-mail is ideally suited for this type of information sharing with the forward button a standard part of all e-mail software programs. One look at your own inbox should be enough to convince you that people know how to forward. So use it to your advantage. But don’t trust that it will happen without some encouragement. Always include links or forms in your e-mail message that encourage subscribers to forward your e-mail to any friends who might appreciate the information.

One reason is psychological. Seeing the word “forward” will induce people to do so. In fact, just including the word, without any fancy forms or links, will increase your chances of someone hitting the forward button. For example, MarketingSherpa always includes the notation “Pls Forward” at the end of every subject line.

More importantly, you can better track viral behavior if readers use the tools you provide, rather than hitting their program’s forward button. You also have more control over the message that the recipient gets with a system designed for that purpose. It’s worth your time to make your forwarding tools easy to use.

So, don’t stop with just a link. While a link will encourage forwarding, an even more effective way is to have a form embedded in the e-mail. Here, you can have the pre-filled name and e-mail address of the sender and include an open box where he or she can put the names of friends along with their e-mail addresses. It makes the whole process faster, easier, and much cooler.

As with all e-mail, you want to make sure your messages look good when forwarded to different size monitors and handheld devices, so be sure to check for broken text or graphics and make sure that the entire message, including all instructions are visible and easy to read.

*Creating A Forward-To-A-Friend Form—A successful FTAF form is one that successfully delivers on your invitation or call to action.

From a functional perspective, FTAF forms should allow you to control the data flow, collect some additional data on your customers, insert marketing messages, and encourage the people receiving the e-mail to opt in for your newsletters. Keep the form short and easy to navigate. And prominently display your privacy and spam policy on the form — make it clear that you will not send other e-mails to their friends unless they explicitly subscribe.

Make it obvious and easy. Place the call to action for your FTAF in an obvious place right up top, as well as in several other locations, including in the footer. And have the form set up so that readers can easily enter the names of friends without having to think about it too much. The more work, the less likely they are to forward.

The more the merrier—Why stop at one friend? Typically, if you provide several boxes for signing up friends, the sender will do just that. They may not include friends on every line, but will likely list two or three people. Set it up so that friends will be listed in separate form fields and include subscription information for each friend. Try providing a different number of address lines to find out how many friends most people are comfortable forwarding to. You can even have some programming done to create cookies that automatically repopulate future forms with the addresses from previous forwards!

Allow people to personalize it—When someone forwards a great e-mail to a friend, they will usually want to put their own personal stamp on it by adding something such as; “This reminded me of our conversation this morning” or “I thought of you when I saw this.” For this reason you’ll want to leave a space where the sender can write her own personal message. In addition, you want the e-mail to appear to come from the sender (the “From” line) and not from your company so that it is more welcomed and won’t be misconstrued as spam.

Once someone has signed up for your newsletter and then forwarded it to his friends, you need to get the friends’ explicit permission to receive your regular newsletter e-mails. You can close this loop if you construct your regular e-mails with the non-subscriber also in mind.