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Links in email

Posted: Fri Mar 20, 2009 6:15 am
by matthijs
Am I the only one who finds it strange that almost every mail application out there sending email campaigns and email questionnaires uses gibberish for it's links in the email? What I mean is:
Hi {name},
Please take out survey <a href="net.mwdv.mail.com?x=hbercvdfcbscbefhjbc kcs&cjkbdsjcksc">here</a>
// .. etc etc
Signed, some organization I know
Say I know who send it. The email says it's from coolorganization.com. Now if links inside the email look like that, there's no way I'm going to click on them as I don't know where I'm being sent to. It might be a scam and the email is in fact not from coolorganization.com

I understand the technical reason why these kinds of links are used and why often a third party email server is used for sending, but if you want conversion (many people clicking links), I would say normal links would be much better. If an URL would be coolorganization.com/survey?t=cbdhche I might actually click on it.

Re: Links in email

Posted: Fri Mar 20, 2009 6:21 am
by Apollo
I guess they're just in it for the numbers. If the crappy gibberish links result in only 25% of the people clicking (compared to when clean links would have been used), but they can crank out 100 times as much emails like this (because they're using tricky mailbots or whatever)... you do the math :)

Re: Links in email

Posted: Fri Mar 20, 2009 7:55 am
by matthijs
Well, I'm actually not talking about spam mail send by bots. Just the regular email campaign, send to a fixed amount of people. So using gibberish for links or clean urls has nothing to do with the ability to send more mail. It's just that for technical reasons they use a certain mailprovider, which has it's own domain and system to track links.

I do exactly the same thing if I use a service as campaignmonitor. An email sent from me gets gibberish links to the domain campaignmonitor uses. But my email campaigns are sent to 100 people and I'm not going to invest a lot in them. But if a larger organization spends a lot of money on creating an email campaign, I would say that something as easy as creating friendly urls is one of the cheapest and easiest things to do to increase the conversion of the campaign.

Re: Links in email

Posted: Fri Mar 20, 2009 9:36 pm
by Apollo
In that case, I don't know really. Possibly they're not even aware of this issue, and just use whatever crappy solution was sold to them - they wouldn't be the first organization spending big bucks on stuff they don't understand squat about :)