Placing a link in your newsletter
Placing a link
For blocks that are clickable as a whole, such as ‘Image’, ‘Button’ and ‘Title line’, enter the URL directly into the link field of that block on the left side of the editor. For an image, you can read where to find this link field in Adding an image to your newsletter.
To place a link in the middle of running text, use the link window:
Open the text block
In your newsletter, click on the ‘Text block’ or the ‘Text with image’ block where you want to place the link.
What a link can point to
In addition to a web page or email address, you can also use a link to point to:
- File: if the file is on your own website, use a regular link to the URL of that file. If you want to upload it to Laposta, see Saving files in Media.
- Phone number: use a
tel:link, as described in Making a phone number clickable in your newsletter. - A specific place within the newsletter itself: use an anchor link or the ‘Content’ block to point to a section further down. See: Placing internal links for a table of contents.
You can also add a variable to a regular link, for example to log subscribers in to your website automatically. You can read how to create such a link in Including a variable in a link.
An email address as a link
If you choose ‘Email’ under ‘Link type’ in the link window, you have the option to include a subject and (part of) the message text alongside the email address, for example:
- Message subject: Registration for general meeting
- Message content: Dear John, I am emailing to let you know that I will be attending the general meeting next Monday. Kind regards,
A mailto: link behind a button or image
A button or image does not have a link window with separate fields. Instead, enter the link directly into the link field of the block in this format:
mailto:example@example.com
You can add a subject and message text at the end as parameters, replacing spaces with %20:
mailto:example@example.com?subject=Subject&body=This%20is%20the%20content%20of%20the%20email
A handy tool for putting together this type of link is mailtolinkgenerator.com.
Keep the included message text short. Email clients apply different limits. Most are generous, but for Outlook the limit is around 600 characters. Above that limit, your message will not come through and the recipient might be shown a Google page instead, for example. If you cannot or do not want to shorten the text, link to a web page with a form that your subscribers can fill in.
Things to keep in mind with links
- Do not put a literal URL in your text. This affects the deliverability of your entire newsletter. When sending, Laposta replaces the underlying link with a link routed through Laposta’s servers. The displayed link and the actual link will then no longer match, which security software may flag as phishing. You can read more about this in Do not use literal links.
- Only use permitted characters. URLs are encoded when sent, which means characters that are not permitted (such as
éandü) can break the link. Ask your web developer to adjust the URL if necessary. - Watch out for narrow columns. Links and email addresses cannot be hyphenated or wrapped, and will push a narrow column outwards. In a preview or testmail, you will see the newsletter become wider at that point. Laposta cannot lock column widths strictly in place, because a number of email clients do not support this.
In step 5 of your campaign, during the last check, Laposta automatically verifies whether the web addresses in your newsletter can be reached. Any links that show up as broken there can be fixed in step 4. What you see in that overview and how to deal with it is explained in Checking whether all links in your newsletter work.
Statistics and link behaviour
When a subscriber clicks on a link, whether from their own email client or from the webversion of your newsletter, it always opens in a new window. This means subscribers do not click away from your newsletter permanently.
After sending, you can go to Results → Campaigns → ‘Links’ to see how many subscribers clicked on each link and how often. Clicks on a mailto: link are not counted here: these open the email client on your subscriber’s computer and do not pass through Laposta’s servers, whereas regular links do. Your subscribers can, of course, also simply reply to your newsletter. You specify which reply-to address to use for this in step 1 of your campaign.