Benefits of Short URLs in Link Building Messages and how to create it

Enterprises often send out hyperlinks to websites or product pages for deeper customer engagement or induce them to purchase or communicate information to their customers over SMS. A traditional hyperlink can add several characters to an already limited 160 character limit of an SMS which can increase cost, lead to compromising on the effectiveness of the communication and deteriorate user experience.

However, any marketing effort is futile unless the outcome is conversions. Content alone cannot help unless it is relevant and assertive.

URL shorteners can enable enterprises to generate personalized, shortened URL, thus eliminating lengthy hyperlinks. It also provides enterprises with strong analytics from personalised links, by capturing data from click rates, geographical information, user device information ( type of browser, operating system, etc.), day of the week, device type, device brand, etc. Enterprises can leverage these analytics capabilities to streamline their campaigns, enhancing brand recall and user experience and most importantly maximise reach that leads to conversions.

These personalised brand URLs can be used for sending promotions, product recommendations, getting consent for compliance, especially in the case for banks, customised offers based on end user’s history and location with geofencing and geo-conquesting, cart abandonment, re-targeting customers and much more.

The ability to shorten message length by eliminating long hyperlinks reduces the overall cost and assists in creating branded domains around different content formats as required, thereby introducing personalisation as compared to traditional, long hyperlinks. It extends the current capability of SMS by combining it with interactive links and user analytics, positioning it as a useful tool to validate user preferences, capture their feedback and form the backbone of a full loop of communication – delivering higher customer engagement.

The number of ads a company does not matter, but the impressions do. The analytics offered by the URL shorteners assist in analyzing the clicks in the promotional campaigns, such as quiz, contests, webinars, and videos launched by the various companies to increase sales and leads.

The number of clicks coming from a particular location enables the company to launch an offline campaign or a related campaign that assists in regenerating interest in their customers while getting them closer to actual sale or desired call to action.. The URL redirection which takes place by clicking on a shortened link targets a particular URL which maintains and improves the SEO ranking level as it works as a reputable backlink source as backlinks are treated as a 301 redirect similar to shortened links. A reliable and knowledgeable partner is required to assist your brand in generating short URLs which are backed by relevant analytics to get the maximum benefit. Having a targeted landing page link reduces the end user’s browsing time drastically and enables them to take the directed action comparatively swiftly.

For e.g A personalised, shortened link helped an airline send personalised services to its frequent flyers and entice new ones with the desired call to action.e.g free meal or deals during seasonal holidays. The airline was able to give more details in the SMS along with the short URL as it shortened the character in the SMS. Once the campaign concluded, the analytics helped the airlines to get actionable insights to further retarget their filtered target audience with emails, calls and help them to book their flights. The shortened URL has the ability to track campaign-wise individual unique links, access real-time actionable insights related to customer behaviour, related to each recipient. The overall conversions increased to about 30% & overall customer experience got elevated.

The URL shortener allows brands to track multiple links & monitor their campaigns effectively. With custom domains, enterprises can segment their content by domain and track campaigns accordingly. Not all URL shorteners come with a complete suite of analytical tools that allow not only to redirect but also track the source of traffic. A link shortener is a perfect solution for businesses to reach the right audience by enabling them to measure, monitor and manage their campaigns that generate analytics that provides actionable insights.

For instance, a retailer that offers discounted prices for top brands throughout the year wanted to ease their re-targeted as it was leading to revenue loss and enhancing their user experience. They opted to give them a link shortener service as a free add on. The campaign messages were sent from the platform of the solution provider. Previously, they had to pay per shortened link per message. The campaign statistics captured displayed the individual mobile number analysis making retargeting easy.
Their campaign targeted 8 million customers generating revenue of ₹200 million.

Link shorteners enrich the retargeting capabilities by providing options of instant retargeting, delayed retargeting, and IP based retargeting to increase the value proposition for enterprises.

Some URL shortener providers provide flexibility to enterprises by offering an easy to use web interface as well as a smart API integration for automated access. For example, one of the main advantages is that one can use such a URL shortener and tracking solution not only with the SMS but also with Whatsapp Business Solution, Viber Business message using the same API.

Some URL shorteners come with a built-in web page developer interface that allows enterprises to be able to build simple web pages with their branding. It allows enterprises to either display relevant information of promotions, validate user data, product launches and other information without the need to code or be dependent on their technical teams to host this information.

The other enhancement is a web conversational engine that can be invoked when the personalised link is clicked by the users. This enables enterprises to have an easy way to drive the kind of conversations they like to have with their users. This is the future of link shorteners.