Are the links you’re including in your email promotions harming your marketing efforts? Could be … even if you don’t spot any obvious problems before you send your messages.
As the resident marketing expert for Business Expert Webinars (http://www.businessexpertwebinars.com), I help speakers plot their marketing strategy, as well as dissect past marketing campaigns that didn’t perform as expected.
In preparation for a recent consultation, the client forwarded an email he had sent out to promote his upcoming webinar. When I opened it, I saw a huge problem — the links he had included were so long they took up nearly two full lines!
Not only was this almost painful to look at, it was likely causing problems for a huge portion of his audience — if the link breaks, the link becomes inactive. The only way to follow the link is to copy and paste it into your browser window … and many people don’t know to do this.
The quick fix: use Tiny URL (http://www.tinyurl.com) to shrink long and ugly links down to a manageable size. Here’s an example:
http://www.on2url.com/app/adtrack.asp?MerchantID=43243&AdID=396893
turns into http://tinyurl.com/6gnuep — much better, isn’t it?
As it turned out, it was fortunate that this particular client had sent the email to me. Because on his end, the link looked fine — it was an embedded link, so the long and ugly version wasn’t visible on his computer screen. Once I returned the email he had sent to me, he could see the problem … and then fix it.