Tip of the week 94 - How to manage links in an email campaign effectively

Click rates are undoubtedly a measuring parameter for email marketers to understand the progress made by their campaigns.

Because, the click rate tells the engagement rate of your campaign and it becomes essential to experiment with various strategies to improve every campaign's click rate.

In this week's tip, let us look at the various best practices you must follow to get better response to the links included in your campaign.

The first step to getting a good email click rate is making sure your links are clickable. That said, let us look at the various best practices you must follow to get better response to the links included in your campaign.

1) Avoid shortened URL

Usage of shortened URL certainly helps in making it easy to type in the web address. It also helps in reducing the character count while framing copy for microblogging or social media platform like Twitter.

But, while adding links to your email campaign content, it is best to avoid shortened URL links.

A shortened URL link has many chances of being identified as suspicious link by ESPs, because it is widely used to perform phishing and spoofing activities. Also, your subscribers will certainly have second thoughts to click on a link that does not have a well-structured URL address.

So, it's best to use a complete URL link to avoid your campaigns getting trapped in spam folders and establish a strong trust of your subscribers over your campaign.

2) Link to a purpose

Email links play a major role in directing the readers towards the main purpose of a particular email campaign. And, adding irrelevant links in your email campaign will confuse the readers and make them run in multiple directions.

This will eventually result in low open and click-through rates of email campaigns from your brand.

Hence, in order to check the relevancy of your email campaign, here are a few questions that you could ask yourselves before adding links to your email content:

- Is the content in the link similar to the theme of the email campaign?
- Is the link directed towards the purpose of a particular email campaign?
- Does this link provide a solution, action, or value that is related to the purpose of the campaign?

3) Craft an engaging anchor text

The text link plays a key role in increasing the click rates and directing the readers to the desired action. Hence, it becomes essential to craft a text link that is brief and meaningful.

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Example,

To read best practices of email marketing click here ✗

The anchor text above is vague and doesn't provide any information.

So, ensure the anchor text is brief, informative, and not a verb phase. For example,

Read email marketing best practices ✔

4) Link design

To fulfil the purpose of an email link, ensure that they are easy to identify and access. The anchor text font, colour, and size are the three factors that a campaign creator has to look out for while designing the anchor text.

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The font style and size of the email anchor text should be similar to the font used in that particular paragraph.

To ensure instant recognition of the link, you can try adding an underline.

To maintain uniformity, ensure that the colour of the email text link is the same as the theme of the campaign or the logo colour of your organization.

5) Easy navigation

The main purpose of adding links in email campaign is to provide a simplified navigation system to the readers. The respective links can help the readers to directly navigate themselves to the required page.

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Establish a single-click navigation system by adding a link that takes them to the webpage described in the anchor text.

Example,

Insert a link that navigates to a webpage that has a list of all the upcoming virtual meetups ✗

Insert link that navigates to Australia Virtual meetup registration page ✔

We hope you found this tip useful! Do share your thoughts in the comment section below.

Thanks & Regards
Vinaya.M