Share-with-your-network (SWYN) is a relatively new phenomenon in the email marketing space. SWYN includes links to social networking sites like Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, Digg etc. Some email pundits believe that SWYN is slowly but surely putting an end to forward-to-a-friend (FTAF) functionality in email. I personally don’t believe this is the case. What is clear so far is that forward-to-a-friend remains a fixture among most email marketing campaigns.

The email marketing agency Smith-Harmon found the following in their report FTAF vs. SWYN – The State of Email Sharing:

“There’s been some murmuring in the industry about the death of forward-to-a-friend (FTAF) lately because of the emergence of share-with-your-network (SWYN) functionality. Unlike FTAF, which is generally one-to-one sharing, SWYN allows subscribers to share an email’s content with all their friends on a social network. Shown to be considerably more viral than FTAF, SWYN also avoids entanglements with CAN-SPAM rules. Despite all those advantages, FTAF enjoys a four-to-one adoption rate over SWYN among the top online retailers. While only 12% of retailers use SWYN, 48% use FTAF—and FTAF adoption is up from 44% in 2006.”

Among retailers using individual SWYN links, Facebook and Twitter are the most popular. MySpace and Digg were the third and fourth most popular, with Delicious, ThisNext and StyleHive seeing minimal usage.

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