Hi Friend!

Sending hyperlinks inside of an email has become commonplace, but do you know what works and what doesn't?

For instance, AOL users cannot receive "clickable" links (hyperlinks) inside an email except from other AOL users. However, most other email clients support hyperlinks.

Including your email address in an email isn't always necessary, since the recipient can simply hit Reply without knowing your address. Still, it's a good idea just to tack it onto the end of your letter, just for added credibility. But sometimes you'll include other email addresses besides your own in your emails, and you'll need to know how to create the link.

Email links can be made two different ways:

me@mymail.com
or
mailto:me@mymail.com

The "mailto:" prefix ensures that it will come through as a hyperlink (except to AOL users), so it's a good idea to use it. 

Here's something that many people are not clear about. It doesn't matter whether you type your email address as Me@MyMail.com or ME@MYMAIL.COM or me@myMAIL.com. That's right. Even if you signed up for the email address of KimJones@mymail.com, you can be reached at kimjones, KIMJONES, and KiMjOnEs. Email addresses are not case sensitive! So, when you're filling out a hard copy form and you feel compelled to write "all lower case" beside your email address, it's not necessary.

Let's say you want to email an advertisement to a group of people. You want to send them to a web site by just clicking a link in your email. 

For example:

Dear Friends,

Please check out this web site and let me know if it's something you might be interested in. Here's the link: http://www.xyzcompany.com.

Regards,
John

The http:// is not always necessary, depending on the recipient's email client, but just to be safe, you want to get into the habit of always including it as a part of your link. Better that than losing potential clients because they didn't want to take the time to copy/paste the link into their browser.

Now, here's another trick you will sometimes incorporate. Let's say you want to keep track of responses to a survey or question but you don't necessarily want to read them all, you're particularly interested in the "yes" replies, or you simply want a way to sort responses to an ad. Check this out:

Dear Friends,

Please take a look at this site: http://www.xyzcompany.com  (Just sample) and let me know if it's something you might be interested in by clicking one of the two links below:

Yes, I'm interested: mailto:me@mymail.com?subject=Yes (not functional)

No, I'm not interested: mailto:me@mymail.com?subject=No (not functional)

Regards,
John

If you click on either of the two email links, you'll see that the subject line of the email is already filled out. That comes from that last string of "?subject=" after the email address portion. (It must be joined together with email address)

Let's take that one step further. Say you want more than a simple yes or no answer or you want them to reply with "More Info" in the subject line. When you're asking for a subject line of more than one word, you need to type what's called an "underscore" between each word. An underscore is the result of holding down the Shift key and pressing the dash or minus sign. So after the ?subject= part of your hyperlink, you'll type More_Info. Here's what the whole thing looks like: me@mymail.com?subject=More_Info.

When you take the time to put a subject line in your mailto links, you tend to get a higher response than if you ask them to type something specific in the subject line. In the lesson on Email Filters, you will learn more about why hyperlinked subject lines are important for organizational and ad tracking purposes.

The most important thing to remember when creating your hyperlinks, whether in a classified ad, an email, or anywhere else, is that you spell them correctly. If you miss just one letter, you've wasted an ad or you've lost credibility in your letter if the recipient can't use your link. 

The best way to test your emails is to first send the email to yourself. When you receive it, the link will be clickable (note that it's not clickable when you're just typing it in your email client--you first have to send and receive it). Actually click on the link to make sure it works!

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Here's a sample of an active hyperlink:

Empowerism  Want more information? Please feel free to join!!

Thanks Jim...there's a lot of info in there to digest.  I was familiar with a little bit of what you discussed but not everything.

Thanks for the lesson...I'll try your suggestions.

Joyce Allen

Joyce, the best way to try and figure out how to do it, is to send yourself some emails. That way you will know how to do it before sending to someone else. If you need some help with it, just let me know!

Nick