When composing GoldMine HTML emails it is possible to insert links, for example to a website, or to a reply email address. You may have discovered that simply typing the link in proper format, e.g. http://www.1stdirect.com, will convert the text to an active link. For most purposes this is fine, however, there’s another way to create links in GoldMine email templates.
When creating the email template you can highlight the text in the body of your template email, that you want to make a link, and then “right click” to pull up a local menu with the option to “insert” links. Form there you will see various “Insert Links” to choose from. In this article we’re going to focus on inserting “http” and “mailto” links.
When you insert a link this way the actual link is not displayed, rather your text is highlighted and underlined as an indication that this text represents a link. You’ve seen this before – for examples “Click Here” or “Contact by Email.”
There are several advantages to inserting your links this way:
1. You don’t take up space with long URLs or lengthy email addresses because the actual address is not displayed.
2. The wording in your email for the link can also be your “call to action” for example – Click here for more information.
3. You can embed tags in the web address link so you can track clicks from your email campaign to your website pages. For example, instead of linking to http://www.1stdirect.com/index.html, if you append to the end of the URL “?source=EmailPromo12” your web analytics software should be able to track and report the number of site visitors that came to your website from your email.
4. You can also designate a predefined “Subject” for the email when inserting a “mailto” address. This is very useful if you’re trying to develop more efficient handling/processes for response emails. For example, an unsubscribe request or a specific product request. In these cases the mailto link would look something like this: mailto:name@domain.com?Subject=Remove from Mailing List.
Click the following link to see what it looks like. Unsubscribe
5. In addition to adding a predefined “Subject” you can also insert a default body. The link would look something like this:
mailto:email@domain.com?subject=Request for Information&body=Please send me information on GoldMine Software. I look forward to hearing from you.
Click the following link to see what it would look like. Request for Information
It takes an extra moment to do these links this way, but when the advantages outweigh the effort it is nice to know there’s a way to format your links this way! If you need further assistance designing your HTML emails with even more elaborate functionality and greater appeal, contact First Direct. Click here to email your request.
