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Link Shortners for Email Campaigns - Not a Good Move

Last updated by Matthew Ruddle on November 07, 2016 16:04

In social media where you only have a few short characters to get over so much information, link shortners (those things that take a huge website address and shorten it down to be a bite-size chunk) are great and an essential tool. However, what a lot of people don't know is the fact that they can have the opposite affect when used within email campaigns.

The question that you're probably asking right now is..... Why?

Well the simple answer is, Spammers use them too!

There is a trick that you will often see within the normal, everyday spam emails you get. It is when an email looks like its come from your bank and is asking you to click a link to log into your account and deal with some urgent issue! When you hover your mouse cursor over the link (carefully!!) the web address that actually displays is something completely different, it's another site and it is because of tactics like this, spammers are using link shortners to hide the real destination of the link.

This has lead to even the most reputable link shortners to be added to blacklists and that has a knock on affect with your campaigns, as you could be hurt by using them then.

There are two solutions to this predicament though: -

  • Get your very own link shortner

Not all link shortners are bad, it is just the ones which are readily available for everyone and anyone which run the risk of being mis-used by spammers, one solution is to have your own link shortner made for your own private use. That way, the only people who will use it will be people who should be using it within your company!

  • Use the normal HTML link

The simplest way to link to something and to get that all important click through, is to simply use the link icon within the editor. This is a simple task of highlighting some text, clicking the link icon and then adding the website address that you would like to send people to - nice, simple and quick! This can be done with images, text....generally anything and helps you get that click through!

So to summarise,

By all means use a link shortner for social media, sometimes that is essential! But for email marketing, either use the simple and effective HTML link or get your own link shortner and use it wisely!