Short links in email campaigns: what helps and what hurts delivery

Email is the one channel where adding a short link can make things worse, and the reason is not length.

The reputation problem, stated honestly

A spam filter looks at the domains in a message. A domain that anyone can create links on — the public shorteners included, ours among them — will always contain some links created by people you would not want to share an envelope with. Filters know this, and they discount accordingly.

That is not an argument against shortening. It is an argument against shortening on a shared host.

A link on links.yourbrand.com is a domain you control, with a reputation built only by your own sending. It looks like your brand in the status bar, it survives a hover, and it does not carry anyone else's history. Two DNS records — a CNAME to our host and a TXT record with the token we show you once — and the certificates are issued for you.

Where a short link actually helps in email

Plain-text sends. The URL is visible, and a 180-character campaign URL wrapped across three lines by the client is both ugly and, in some clients, broken by the wrap.

The link you will need to change. A newsletter is archived, forwarded and read months later. When the campaign page is retired, a short link is one edit; a hard-coded URL in a hundred thousand delivered messages is a 404 forever.

Anything you also print or post. The same short link on the poster, in the email and in the Instagram bio gives you one set of numbers instead of three that do not agree.

Long tagged URLs. A campaign URL with five UTM parameters is mostly noise. Attach the tags to the link once and they are applied on every redirect without appearing in the message.

Where it does not

Transactional email — password resets, receipts, verification. Those links are already unique per recipient, already short-lived, and a shortener adds a hop between the customer and something they are anxious about. Send the real URL.

Unsubscribe links. They must work forever, they are checked by filters, and one-click unsubscribe headers expect the real endpoint.

The setup that avoids both problems

1. 1

   Add the subdomain and verify it

   Dashboard, then Domains, then add links.yourbrand.com. Add the CNAME and the TXT record at your DNS host and click verify. Certificates follow automatically once both records resolve.

2. 2

   Decide who owns click tracking

   Your email platform almost certainly rewrites every link through its own domain. Turn that off for already-shortened links, or keep it and read your numbers from the platform. Two layers of tracking produce two different totals and an afternoon of argument.

3. 3

   Build the tagged URL first, shorten second

   Assemble the destination with its UTM parameters, check it loads, then create the short link. Fixing a typo in a parameter afterwards means editing the destination, which is one edit rather than a resend.

4. 4

   Send yourself the real thing

   A seed send to Gmail, Outlook and one mobile client. Click the link from each. This is where a broken CNAME or a missing certificate shows up, and it takes four minutes.

Reading the numbers afterwards

Email clicks arrive with a referrer that is usually empty — most clients strip it — so they land in the direct bucket rather than an email one unless you tag them. That is the practical reason to set utm_medium=email on every link in a campaign: without it, your email traffic is indistinguishable from someone typing the URL.

Bots are the other half. Security scanners at large employers open every link in an inbound message, sometimes within seconds of delivery, which is why an email campaign's click count often spikes before any human has read it. Those visits are separated out: known bot agents are counted in their own bucket and kept out of every audience breakdown, so the country, device and referrer tables you read are human traffic. Treat the first hour of an email send as suspect regardless.

For the domain half of all this, see custom domain links — it is the part that changes deliverability, and the part worth doing before the next send.