Review: Recommend-It.com

Recommend-It.com is provides a service to siteowners that encourages visitors to recommend a site they like to their friends, thus facilitating the vital word-of-mouth advertising principle that all businesses covet. Their system provides:

1. Several attractive and compelling buttons you can select from to get people to recommend your page to their friends. All you have to do is copy and paste custom HTML code onto you webpage, and the button appears.
2. A pop-up form. Recommend-It's system includes four different forms, displayed sequentially, careful not to ask too much at one time so as to collect the maximum amount of information the recommender is willing to supply. If you are the recommender, this is what you see:

• Form 1, which asks your name and e-mail address, and the e-mail addresses of up to 10 friends, and asks you if you want to enter a free contest for $10,000 and a Sony DVD player. When you submit the form, you get...
• Form 2, which tells you the e-mail has been sent, and asks you if you'd like to sign up for a free e-mail ezine or premium offer from a list of two dozen or so. When you submit the form you get...
• Form 3, which asks your gender, country, and choice of HTML or ASCII e-mail. When you submit this form you get....
• Form 4, which is a reminder that you must confirm your e-mail subscription to the ezines you signed up for.

Sample of Form 1. This is an example only.

3. Double incentives for the recommender to submit the form that pops up: (1) desire to share his discovery with a friend, and (2) a contest offering valuable prizes.
4. Double incentives for siteowners to include the Recommend-It button on their site: (1) increased traffic, and (2) revenues from recommenders who sign-up for e-mail newsletters.
5. Trust to encourage giving personal information, engendered by a clear privacy policy and membership with TRUST-e.
6. Revenue model for Recommend-It from selling advertising in e-mail newsletters they publish, opt-in mailing lists, and bonuses for signing up recommenders for premium third-party programs.

How well does the system work? I think a lot depends upon your site. Do you have good content that impresses people? If so, a Recommend-It button makes it easy for visitors to tell their friends.

Eugene Borukhovich of Multi Dimensional Shopping (http://mds-mall.com) says, "We've had the Recommend-It button on our site for several months now and the effect has been very noticeable. We also found that the placement of the button made a big difference in the amount of recommendations we get. Recommend-It makes it very simple, with just one form, to recommend the site to our potential customers. We originally added our own CGI script to do all this, but it was seldom used by our site's visitors. We are not sure why more people choose to use their button, but I think the prize offer might have something to do with it."

On the downside, some find Recommend-It's ezine approach distracting and annoying. Jeff Zweig of AeroScan, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, says, "We've used Recommend-It on several sites, and although it's a really useful service and the usage reporting is great, we've gotten some comments back from site visitors that they feel the recommendation emails they received were a bit 'in your face' in terms of the third party advertising messages Recommend-It includes."

Allowing Recommend-It.com to try for opt-in e-mail addresses is the toll siteowners pay. Siteowners don't lose traffic, since the pop-up box goes away when submission is complete, and the visitor is still on your site. But if your customers are offended by the e-mail they receive, it could affect your reputation. Recommend-It.com claims 50,000 website members and 1.7 million newsletter subscriptions, so it is widely used. The company's e-mail lists are managed by NetCreations, Inc., a leader in opt-in e-mail lists.

As an exercise I placed Recommend-It buttons on my new DoctorEbiz.com site. http://doctorebiz.com In 8 days there were 3,198 unique visitors (according to HitBox statistics), 2,184 subscribed via the form (according to my logfile records), 251 recommended the site to others using the Recommend-It.com button, and 15 signed up for on of their ezines (according to Recommend-It statistics, which earned me $4.50 so far at 30 cents per sign-up). This tells me that less than 6% of the recommenders got distracted with the ezines. The 11.5% recommendation rate of subscribers, however, is probably abnormally high considering I asked my Web Marketing Today subscribers to test the button, and the new site had practically no content to recommend. (That'll change soon!)

Here's a conservative prediction of what putting the Recommend-It button on a site might do.

• Assuming a 5% click-through-rate and referral rate using a Recommend-It button, and
• Assuming that 50% of the recommendation recipients click-through to see the site,
• Then a site could experience a traffic increase 2.5% per month from this method.

A similar but much smaller service is Let 'Em Know! http://www.letemknow.com It doesn't use a button but a small form on the siteowner's webpage. Can you develop your own tell-a-friend referral form? A free CGI program at BigNoseBird.com is available. http://bignosebird.com/cgi-bin/birdcast.cgi Others are available free from various CGI/Perl sites.

Can get as good a referral rate with your own home-brew form as you can with Recommend-It.com's. I don't think so. In July 1999 I set up a "Tell a Friend" link on every page of my website. But by February 2000, only about 125 people had used the service. I've concluded that since Recommend-It.com's very business model depends upon getting the highest possible referral response, and since they've been refining their collection method for several years, you'll get YOUR highest referral rate using their button.

Notice that the first screen (Form 1) that collects referral information is the only one important to YOUR referral rate, and there is no extraneous clutter of other ezines until AFTER that form has been submitted. Even though you may not prefer the solicitation for ezine lists, it won't affect your referral rate. I've decided to experiment with using Recommend-It.com on my larger WilsonWeb.com site -- I think it'll help in word-of-mouth advertising that will build my site traffic. If you have a strong content site, your traffic will probably see some growth from Recommend-It.com, too.