Viral marketing is a great part of a strategy to build your email lists. However, there are rules about how you can gather addresses based on viral marketing. I know it's a hard pill to swallow, but you can't just gather up and start sending email to all the addresses that your users forwarded messages to, regardless of whether they are available in your reports or not.

By CAN-SPAM law a user must opt in to receiving messages from you, either by explicitly stating that they want your email, or by completing a transaction on your Web site (like purchasing, joining, etc., which is covered in CAN-SPAM as a separate condition).

There are a few ways to go about collecting the referral addresses and remarketing to them but the right way to do it is to include an option for the forwardee to subscribe via the forwarded message. Often times this means having to send a slightly different message to the forwardees, but if your goal is to get them to sign up for your newsletter, then that should be a welcome trade off. Text such as: "This message was forwarded to you by XYZ user. If you want to subscribe to this newsletter, please go here." should be in the header of your message.

It's an easy thing to accomplish that can yield big rewards in list growth.  For more detailed information about list building, download our white paper "How to Grow Your Email Opt-In List".

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