All emails and text messages that are sent go through our link shortener. This is good practice for the following reasons:
- Long links can often get broken and no longer work.
- It enables us to track link clicks better and provide more statistical information on your marketing and sales campaigns.
- Long links in text messages are not very usable and can result in additional charges.
We are using the short domain that we own: http://evto.io, and a standard format of a slash after the domain and then six alphanumeric characters that are case sensitive. Links are stored for 1 year after last use. So if 1 day before we hit a year mark on a link someone uses the link, we set it not to expire for another year. Expiring links allows us to be efficient in our data storage.
In some cases we cannot shorten a link. If you are sending an HTML email with a URL set on the actual link text, such as the example below, we cannot shorten it or it will likely be flagged by the receiving email client as phishing, creating distrust of the link.
< a href = "abc.com"> abc.com < / a>
Click tracking is primarily available to those using our CRM module, although some statistics are available to the base plan. In the CRM module we track the last activity of your customer and clicking on a link counts. Email newsletters show statistics on how many clicks were received for an email which gives you information on how well your email performed. We plan to add more tracking statistics in the future, especially for text messages.
Issues with Link Shortening
Some browsers, antivirus, or malware software may prevent the redirect from happening and make link shortening not work well for you. Here are some options to take if that's the case:
- Have customer change their settings to allow the redirecting. For example, see "Allow specific websites" in this Windows Defender article.
- You can also prevent it on any link you want by entering io="keep" in the anchor tag < a href = "abc.com" io="keep" > ....</a>
- You can turn this off in General Settings.