Using short links in email marketing

When you send a newsletter or an announcement, dropping a long address straight into the body breaks lines and reads badly — even more so once campaign parameters are attached. Short links keep the email clean while also letting you see which part of it drove the clicks.

Keeping the body and buttons clean

Email clients handle long addresses poorly. An address that runs past one line wraps and breaks mid-string, sometimes splitting the clickable area in two. Recipients reading a plain-text version see that long address in full.

Wrapping it in a short link cuts the address down to a length you can take in at a glance. The same holds in HTML email, where the link sits behind a button. A short href is easier to read and edit in the markup, and it doesn't look awkward when a client expands the link inline.

One caution, though: even with a short link, it's better to keep the destination guessable. Putting a label next to the button or in the body — something like "See pricing" — tells recipients where they're headed and lets them click with confidence.

Giving each CTA its own link

One marketing email usually carries several links to the same destination: a button in the top header, a text link mid-body, and a button at the very bottom can all point to the same page. If you use the same link for all three, you can't tell where the click happened.

Making a distinct short link for each spot solves this. Even when the destination is identical, separate links are counted separately, which lets you answer questions like:

• Do people click the top button first, or read through and click the bottom one?
• Does the image button or the text link get clicked more?
• Does that secondary offer link in the second section actually get used?

linkpado counts every click without exception, because it answers with a 302 that routes through the server each time rather than a 301 the browser caches. After you log in you can see clicks, referrers, and device and region per link, so comparing the numbers across your per-CTA links answers the questions above directly.

Combining with campaign parameters

Per-link click counts are the view inside linkpado. If you also want the same traffic to show up as "email visits" in the analytics tool on the destination page (Google Analytics, for example), attach campaign parameters (UTM) to the destination address.

The order is:

1. First add UTM parameters such as utm_medium=email to the destination address.
2. Shorten that address with linkpado.
3. Change just utm_content per CTA (e.g. header_button, footer_button) to make a different short link for each spot.

UTMs are part of the destination address, so they're carried along intact when the short link redirects. You end up with two layers of data: linkpado counts clicks per link, and the destination's analytics tool records campaign traffic labeled by UTM. The details of adding UTMs are covered in Campaign tracking with UTM parameters and short links.

Protecting deliverability and reputation

There's an honest point to make about using short links in email: spam filters can view them with suspicion. A shortened link hides its destination, and some filters treat that as a risk signal. A number of free shorteners have been abused for spam and phishing often enough that their domain reputation has dropped, and a link from such a domain mixed into your email raises the chance the whole message lands in the spam folder.

The principles for reducing that are simple.

• Use a shortener whose reputation is managed. The more freely a service hides any address, the more it gets abused, and the more filters distrust it.
• Point only to destinations you trust. A short link ultimately borrows the trust of the page behind it.
• Don't disguise the destination. If the place you described in the body differs from where the click actually lands, both recipients and filters withdraw their trust.

linkpado only shortens URLs on approved domains. It won't indiscriminately hide arbitrary external addresses, so the destinations its links point to stay within a trusted range. It also forwards straight through to the destination with no interstitial ad or waiting screen, keeping the path a recipient travels simple and predictable.

Short links are a tool for keeping email clean and making clicks measurable, not a way to conceal a destination. Hold that distinction and you get the benefits without hurting deliverability. To make a link yourself, try it from the home page.