SMS marketing has a lot of potential for building long-term relationships with clients, spreading information about emergency developments or offers, and growing your brand awareness.
Though text messages show themselves better than their competitor, email, in regard to open rates, it has limited capacities, namely 160 characters per message, and the inability to use as much digital content as other channels.
However, you can still use a text with a link and direct your recipients to any website you want. In this article, we will explain how to put a link in a text message and how to overcome major issues you might get using SMS with a link.
What is the difference between a link and a hyperlink?
Hyperlink, link, and URL are the terms that are usually used as synonyms. In most cases, it is okay, and replacing one term with other is acceptable and doesn’t change any senses.
When talking about SMS messages, it is important to understand the difference, especially when you are doing it for the first time, so you can have realistic expectations.
A link is a URL address of any website on the Internet. For example, testelium.com/api will be a simple link, as it represents the address of one of the pages of our websites.
A hyperlink, in turn, is an element on the page that will lead you to the aforementioned page. It can be a word or a phrase, an image, a button, etc. For example, here the phrase “SMS delivery testing API integration” will redirect you to the page testelium.com/api, but you don’t see the URL address itself.
Clickable links are used within other web pages and are considered hyperlinks as well, as they will take you to the aforementioned URL address, thanks to HTML.
So, here is the main difference between link and hyperlink.
Can you use both in SMS?
Why is it important? The reason is that you can’t send hyperlinks in a text message, meaning that you can’t make any word in your message a clickable link, as SMS doesn’t support HTML.
At the same time, you are still able to send an embed link in text like testelium.com or and modern smartphones will be able to turn them into clickable links, so your customers won’t need to copy and paste them into the browser.
However, a lot of specialists and companies still use these two terms as synonyms. Don’t let yourself get confused with such usage of vocabulary.
How to add Links in Text Messages correctly
The answer is yes, you can insert a web link in a text message. To do that, you need to ensure that the length of your text with a link won’t exceed 160 characters.
When sending a text message with links, you need to run a test before launching the actual marketing campaign. You don’t want to send a message with a broken link to your subscribers. Firstly, in this case, you won’t get any results and basically waste the resources spent on this launch. Secondly, you might only irritate your customers that would click on the link, and follow it to find out it is working properly.
So, always click the link yourself to see if it redirects to the page you planned. However, it is not all: you might use a 2-way SMS testing service like Testelium not only to power up automated SMS delivery testing but to check what shape your initial message reaches the end-point receiver and if the link hasn’t gone through any unwanted changes.
How do you insert a hyperlink in a text message?
How to text a link? It is quite easy to insert a hyperlink in a text message: you just need to type it into your text body. However, here you might face some challenges: what if your link takes too many characters, and you are unable to compose an adequate and efficient message?
Then, you might use a link shortener. The three most popular tools are Bitly, Rebrandly, and TinyURL: they take your link and give you the one, significantly shorter generated on their domain.
It sounds definitely like a valid solution, but unfortunately, link shorteners have themselves compromised. You don’t see what lies under the link shortened by a special tool, you just see its domain and set of symbols that were endowed to your initial link. As you can guess, cybercriminals have leveraged this loophole for a text message scam and for their own gain.
Nowadays, a lot of spam filters might not let the link with Bitly or a similar domain to the end-point recipient, marking it as spam or other dangerous content.
To avoid having your messages marked as spam, you might choose to switch to branded links that contain the name of your company on the brand in it. It will not only eliminate the threat of spam filters but increases your brand awareness among your audience.
How do you track the performance (CTR)?
Checking the performance of your URL in a text message is a key to optimization and reaching better results in the future. As with any other marketing channel, reporting and analytics help you to understand when something is working good and bad, what practices and approaches you should scale and implement en masse, and what aspects need to be improved or reinvented.
Click-through rate (CTR) is the parameter that will show the efficiency of a hyperlink in a text message. Basically, it is a ratio between the number of clicks made and the number of recipients of the message. So, if you have sent 100 messages, and there are 50 unique clicks, it means that your CTR is 50 percent.
To track CTR, you might use the analytics capacities of the SMS messaging software you adapted, or use UTM tracking and check the statistics through your Google Analytics accounts.
There are also different rates used for SMS marketing analytics, for example, open rate, conversion rate, etc. SMS deliverability, delivery delay, and correctness of delivery play an important role as well, and you can access this data through Testelium reports. However, they don’t directly reflect the performance of the SMS hyperlink: an open rate concerns technical aspects of SMS marketing, while the conversion rate will depend on other parameters of the customer journey, for example, your website, client services, etc.
How do you make sure your link is displayed correctly for the end-user?
Regular testing of your bulk SMS traffic allows you to keep track of your SMS delivery to the end-point recipient. The Testelium platform tests if your messages are delivered successfully, if you receive valid delivery reports and if the messages reach your audience without any changes.
Testelium can help you test your links’ correctness in text messages. We provide you with an opportunity to check the delivery of a hyperlink to the users of any mobile carrier in any country and see if everything works as planned. You won’t be able to do it manually, but through our Testelium tool, you will be able to receive a result in a few seconds after launch.
Summing up
Hopefully, this article has shown you how to embed a link in the text. As you can see, it is a pretty simple process, and with the info, we shared here, you should not have any difficulties sending a link in a text message.
Though text messages show themselves better than their competitor, email, in regard to open rates, it has limited capacities, namely 160 characters per message, and the inability to use as much digital content as other channels.
However, you can still use a text with a link and direct your recipients to any website you want. In this article, we will explain how to put a link in a text message and how to overcome major issues you might get using SMS with a link.
