Abbreviate Your URL with SnipURL
It happened to me last week: a client sent me an email with an impossibly long URL in it that he wanted me to click and check out. The database URL was over 200 characters long, and was utterly unclickable.
I could not even cut, copy, and paste the URL into my browser, because my email client had truncated the address several times. I had to bust into email properties, wade through the code before I found the link — lots of work to get to the URL he wanted me to see.
There IS a better way….
If you are sending a long and potentially long and unclickable URL via email, make it easy on your recipient. Use the easy and free URL abbreviating service at www.snipurl.com .
Here is how it works:
Suppose you want to send someone a list of Grand Rapids Realtors, and you find your list at this URL:
http://connect2agent.com/agentlist.asp?ssstate=MI&scity=Grand+Rapids
Now, that is one long URL (not as bad as the one I got in my email last week, but you get the idea.) It is not memorable. Lots of ? and & and = also make a URL hard to remember…and it can potentially make your email link unclickable.
So I went to www.snipurl.com , entered the above link, and got the following address:
I went from 68 characters to 23 characters. That’s a 38% difference in size.
I also checked my stats program: sure enough, the referring site is http://snipurl.com — so you can even track (to a limited extent) if your email recipient clicked upon your abbreviated link (if you use your own site.)
Yes, it IS an extra step. But it helps click-through rates and makes your email more user friendly.
And if you are doing the sending, shouldn’t YOU take the extra step — instead of making your recipient take extra steps to view your site?
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[…] Less than half the length! That’s more like it! It’s Twitterific! (Also handy for long, non-Twitter URLs.) So I use a TinyURL at Twitter, never the long URL. Makes sense…and it’s kinder to Twitterers. […]