Invite a friend C70004

Description

A form that is sent by a registered user of a website to one or multiple contacts. A contact can be invited by manually typing the contact’s e-mail address and name. Often the user may include a personal message or edit the standard composed text.

Context of Use

Invite a friend is often used at community sites. A registered user can notify his friends to register themselves on the website. Once they are registered, these friends can invite their own contacts to the website.

How it works

Users may invite their contacts to join a website. This step is often a part of the registration process. On most websites the user has to be logged in. Once one is logged in, he can choose to invite friends. The user has to manually provide the names and e-mail addresses of the contacts he wants to invite. These fields are mandatory and are marked with an asterisk (it is important to include the sentence: ‘Fields with * are mandatory’ on top of the page). For each name and e-mail address that is submitted (by pressing on ‘Add this friend’ button or enter) new ‘Name’ and ‘E-mail address’ fields appear, and so on… Sometimes the user is able to send a personal message as well, or a standard text can be edited in the text field. Composing a personal message is not mandatory to send invitations, but does seem more friendly and feels more personal towards the recipients. Once the user has provided all the required information, a button has to be pressed to submit the invitations.

The invitations are send to the recipients. The invitation includes a standard text sometimes accompanied by a personal message or an edited version of the standard text. The name and e-mail address of the sender is also communicated to the recipient (note: due to the log in, this information can be automatically accessed) in the invitation e-mail. The most important element in this invitation is a prominent call-to-action button to register themselves on the website. The button is linked to the specific ‘Register’ page on the website. The text in the invitation e-mail may look like: “Dear [name recipient], [name sender] ([e-mail address sender]) wants to invite you to join our community (space for USP of the website community). Please follow this link to join us: HYPERLINK “http://www.titlesite.com/mainmenu/submenu” http://www.titlesite.com/mainmenu/submenu (this links to a registration page). When you are not able to view the content of the link, please paste the URL in your browser. With kind regards, [team or contact person of company] HYPERLINK “http://www.titlesite.com” http://www.titlesite.com”
Once the invitations are sent, a confirmation message is shown on screen. The user is informed on the e-mail addresses the invitations have been sent to.

Specification

The user is required to provide e-mail addresses and names of the contacts he wishes to invite. ‘Personal message’ is an optional field. The user’s e-mail address and name are extracted from his registered personal information.

Related patterns

Contact form (pattern C70001) pattern and Mail-a-friend (pattern C70003) pattern are related to the Invite-a-friend pattern, because of their almost identical lay-out and fields. The striking difference between these patterns lies in their purpose. The contact form aims to contact the website’s owner, whereas the mail-a-friend form and invite-a-friend form want to recommend the website’s content to other persons. The mail-a-friend form is most similar to the invite-a-friend form, they both recommend certain content to a friend (main difference: the latter always recommends the website as a whole with the specific objective to register). However, all forms send a message to a receiver.