Forward to a friend

[Kelly_Harman1]

Does anyone currently use the forward to a friend feature? I was wondering if it was possible to add a snippet that lets the person know a friend had us send this. So they don't assume we are just spamming them. 

[Grace_Brebner3]

Unfortunately not - and this is the biggest limitation and probably the primary reason why people don't use the forward to a friend feature; you don't get to control those details. 

[SanfordWhiteman · Accepted solution]

Actually (here it comes) you sort of can!

A person created via Forward to Friend has the Lead Source "Forward to Friend."

So on the very first F2F email to a person, you can insert conditional content, say via a Velocity token:

#if( $lead.LeadSource.equals("Forward to Friend") && $lead.F2FWelcomeSent.equals("") )
A friend likes you.
#end

Then have a trigger campaign on Received Forward to Friend Email that flips a Boolean field (in this example it's called F2FWelcomeSent) to true after a minute. (I generally hate arbitrary Wait steps but AFAIK there's no other way to do this one.)

Now, for a person who already exists in the db, but whose friend forwards them something, that's considerably more complex. You have to call the F2F endpoint as a webhook. More than I can get into in this response, maybe a blog post sometime.

P.S. There are legal reasons to avoid Forward to Friend, such as GDPR and similar legislation, which are a different question.

[Grace_Brebner3]

and then @SanfordWhiteman comes in with the wizardry... this is amazing.