There are some benefits to using link shorteners including click tracking, passing campaign UTM tags/variables, consolidating incredibly long urls and limiting character count.
However, there are critical situations where we don’t recommend using them, especially in your email marketing.

A few good reasons not to use 3rd party link shorteners in your email marketing

For starters, people don’t trust them as much because they are commonly used by spammers or phishing schemes. These spammers can even jeopardize legitimate link shortening services, getting the service blacklisted and affecting all who use it.
Additionally, a confused mind doesn’t act (sales adage) so seeing a URL that isn’t evident what the destination is or what the content may be will deter people from clicking.
You are depending on 3rd parties to work properly. Since the shortened links utilize redirect technology, you run a greater risk of having the person who clicked the link not make it to their destination (latency, outage, etc.). This extra hop these links need to go through provide no added optimization or value.

Better alternatives to using 3rd party link shorteners

You could create your own custom domain/vanity link shortener. When someone clicks on the link you’ve shared, they can see something more closely related to your website/business name or brand. There is a massive list of top level domains you can choose from to get creative with your custom domain link shortener. Popular 3rd party shorteners, like bit.ly, do offer a service to map your custom domain to their link shortening technology but it’s still not optimal for the reasons above. Just a better option than displaying bit.ly/blahblahblah in your email.
The best alternative is to use your email builder in your email marketing/marketing automation platform. Simply create a hyperlink by inserting your url on text or images, instead. It should be extremely easy to select what you want hyperlinked and then insert the URL or document link. Here’s a quick demo of how it’s done in Net-Results new drag-and-drop mobile responsive email builder:
By hyperlinking on text or images, you get the best of everything:

  • The link location and destination content is more clear
  • Your marketing automation platform will give you all the click-through stats that a link shortening service would, plus all the added clickstream intelligence
  • You can still pass UTM tags in your URL
  • And you control how long the hyperlink is by selecting the text, even if the underlying url is 100 characters or more.

With marketing automation and using hyperlinks on text/images, you won’t lose any of the benefits of using link shorteners like analytics (in fact you’ll get so much more) all while avoiding the pitfalls that often come with 3rd party link shorteners.

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Lucy