We’ve certainly a lot to say about how URL shorteners can boost your marketing efforts, from boosting click-through rates for emails to improving your branding through personalized domains.
So it’s probably no surprise when we say that even strategic email campaigns can benefit from shortened URLs. In today’s post, we’ll look at how the benefits of shortened URLs extend to your organized email marketing efforts, and how they help your campaigns achieve their objectives.
What are Email Marketing Campaigns?
Before we begin, let’s clarify what we mean by “email marketing campaign.” An email marketing campaign is a series of emails that share a common, metric-driven goal. Usually, these goals are based around generating leads or sales, but they can also be geared towards building relationships or fostering loyalty.
Email marketing campaigns are typically organized into three parts.
The first part is the mailing list itself. This is the group of people who will receive your campaign emails.
The second part is the email campaign content. This is the series of messages that you’ll be sending out as part of your campaign.
The third and final part is the email marketing campaign schedule. This is the timeline of activity, including dates for sending emails, sending follow-ups, and analyzing results.
As you might imagine given the term, campaign, email marketing campaigns involve multiple emails sent in a specific order over time. Your leads might receive either a sequence of emails with a beginning, middle, and end; or they might receive an array of different approaches like a generic cold open, then an informative email, and then a discount offer.
Different campaigns can have different goals. They’ve been deployed to do everything from generating new customers, contacting leads who have dropped off (ex. those who abandoned their carts), and upsell services to customers who’ve completed purchases in the past.
Email marketing campaigns can be tremendously effective, now matter what the seeming dominance of social media and direct messaging apps might lead you to believe. They can lead to ROI of as much as $36 for every dollar spent, which is vastly more profitable than many other marketing approaches.
They also represent a direct line of communication with your consumers—and with an average email open rate of 20.94% across all industries, it’s clear that people are reading!
How Do Shortened URLs Help Email Marketing Campaigns?
So what’s the secret sauce behind shortened URLs that helps drive email marketing campaign success? It’s a combination of just about everything, really.
1. They help you deliver experiences, not junk mail
The secret to ensuring that your subscribers appreciate your marketing communications is to design them as experiences. That doesn’t just mean providing one good email, but a whole ecosystem of consistently high-quality emails that deliver your message in an engaging fashion.
One of the worst offenders when it comes to junk mail is URL clutter. A long, ugly URL can immediately turn off even the most interested recipient. A short, clean, and branded URL tells your subscribers that you care about delivering a quality experience—and that’s exactly the kind of message you want to send with your email marketing campaign.
For instance, try hovering over the two links in the samples below:
“We’re the go-to name in sportswear. Check out our website for an exclusive offer!”
“We’re the go-to name in sportswear. Check out our website for an exclusive offer!”
The eye is naturally drawn to movement, so when that URL preview shows up on the bottom-left half of the screen, you can bet your readers are taking notice–and likely making snap judgments given what they see.
2. They build trust with your email readers
Trust is one of the biggest barriers to success in email marketing – and part of what makes it a potentially risky strategy. After all, people are bombarded with emails every day, many of which are scams, phishing attempts, or plain unreadable and annoying attempts at selling you something.
Long, confusing links are a huge turnoff for email recipients. They look spammy, and can quickly erode any trust that your recipients have in you or your brand.
On the other hand, shortened URLs give your emails a clean, polished look that instills confidence in your readers and encourages them to click through. They also help set expectations if they’re designed well, giving a quick preview for your subscribers of what they’re actually clicking on.
Even better are customized domains, which can further reinforce your brand and build trust with your audience. Equipping all of your campaign links with TinyURL’s branded domains provides a sense of trustworthy consistency that’ll help you secure those clicks and keep your subscribers reading.
3. You can excite your readers with compelling CTAs
When running email marketing campaigns, it can be difficult to stick the landing. You’ve spent all this time writing great content, but if your call-to-action (CTA) isn’t optimized, all that effort may go to waste.
Compelling CTAs are essential to email marketing success, but crafting the perfect CTA is easier said than done. In order to maximize your click-through rate (CTR), you need to find that sweet spot between being too pushy and not pushy enough.
Fortunately, shortened URLs can help. By keeping your CTAs short, sweet, and to the point, you can make it easy for your recipients to understand what you’re offering and why they should care. No one wants to click on a CTA that’s confusing or unclear – but with a shortened URL, you can be sure that your readers will always know exactly where they’re going.
4. They help you be more subtle when tracking traffic
Email marketing can be a great way to drive traffic to your website – but it’s not always the best option for tracking that traffic. Long, ugly links with a bunch of parameters tacked on the end are both unsightly, and a big red flag that your content is designed with sales (instead of great user experience) in mind.
Unfortunately, these parameters (known as UTM tags) are pretty much the only convenient way to track how your email marketing campaign is performing, beyond the relatively simplistic information you get out of the box from Google Analytics. So what’s a marketer to do?
The answer, of course, is URL shorteners. By hiding your tag-loaded links behind a shortened slug, you’ll be able to track your traffic without sacrificing the look and feel of your email. Plus, URL shorteners like TinyURL come with campaign monitoring and analytics tools that can provide you with additional real-time insights into your email marketing campaign performance.
5. They let you keep your links tidy (and readable) on mobile
It’s no secret that more and more people are reading their email on mobile devices, which poses a challenge for marketers. Mobile screens are small, which means there’s only so much real estate to work with when crafting your message.
Long, unwieldy URLs can quickly eat up valuable space on a mobile screen, making your email difficult to read and navigate. Shortened links, on the other hand, take up far less space and are much easier on the eyes – not to mention the thumbs.
Conclusion: Run Better Campaigns with TinyURL
There’s no doubt about it – shortened URLs can be a powerful asset for any email marketing campaign. From building trust and confidence to improving click-through rates, using a URL shortening service can help you take your campaigns to the next level.
And with TinyURL, things can get even better. Our branded and customized links allow you to give your email campaigns a sense of personality, with custom domains that you can choose for each brand, or even each campaign individually.
Plus, our campaign monitoring and analytics features allow you to see how your email marketing campaigns are doing, with deep insights into the geographical origin and device type of all your traffic, as well as into your user journeys.
Ready to get started? Check out our pricing options today and sign up! Or, contact us for custom packages tailored to your needs.
