Do your readers know exactly who in your organization to contact and how to reach them when they have specific questions? Do you? With mailto links, your subscribers can click the link and ask the perfect person their questions. Contacting specific departments is easy! You can adjust your mailto links to direct messages to specific members of your sales team or let your subscribers easily provide feedback.
Mailto links are a great tool to use in your email marketing campaigns. Since we’ve explained why no-reply emails are a terrible idea in a previous article, it’s likely you’re already sending out emails with proper reply-to addresses monitored by a designated team or email marketing associate. But are you using mailto links yet?
What if you’re running several campaigns and want to keep all the replies straight? It’s difficult to manually separate general queries from specific conversations about your latest promotional deal. What’s the solution? Mailto links!
Create an HTML code for an email link to let your readers get in touch. Not quite sure what email links, or mailto links, are? We have your back.
We’ll explain how to link to an email by coding an HTML mailto link that’s prepopulated with fields like subject line, “to” address, carbon copy (Cc), blind carbon copy (Bcc) email addresses, and an email body. We’ll also review the advantages and disadvantages of using a mailto link.
What is an HTML mailto link?
Mailto – that’s not a real word, right? Like the usual jumble of acronyms and seemingly made-up email words, yes, it’s a real word.
“Mailto” is HTML code that adds a link to a web page or email – anywhere you can insert HTML. When your readers click on the mailto link, it opens an email message in their default email client, like Gmail, Microsoft Outlook, or Yahoo Mail.
In its most basic form, a mailto link looks like this:
<a href="mailto:[email protected]">Get in touch!</a>
We’ll unpack this soon in our code tutorial and discuss other parameters you can specify, like subject lines and “to” addresses. That’s right, with mailto links, you can direct conversations to the right individuals in your organization.
Make it easy for your subscribers to contact the person ready and capable to help them with their specific questions and needs. After all, as any email marketer will tell you, good marketing strategies revolve around starting conversations with customers.
Why are mailto links useful?
As we mentioned, mailto links are a great way to direct readers’ messages to the right recipients in your organization. But there are even more reasons to use mailto links. Here are some benefits of using mailto links:
- Direct your emails to specific recipients. Separate general queries from customer feedback, technical support queries, and refund requests.
- Minimize reply-to errors. Sometimes, your customer really wants to get in touch. But they misspell your email address. Avoid these errors and lower user friction with mailto links.
- Sort incoming mail. Let’s say you’re running a Mongolia Business Email List small business and don’t have many email marketers available to monitor your business’s email at all times and sort through different incoming mail. Use tags and filters on your end based on specific email subject lines (that you set in your mailto emails) to sort all incoming messages.
Is there a downside to using HTML email links?
So, what’s the catch? Well, here are a few reasons why mailto links might cause issues:
- Some of your readers use web-based clients like gmail.com or yahoo.com. Not every one of your readers will have a default email client setup on their laptop. While they’re more likely to have one specified for a mobile device, there’s no guarantee users will have one set up. Mailto links won’t work for these subscribers.
- It’s harder to track mailto link clicks. While it’s easy to track how many readers interact with web forms, it’s difficult to keep tabs on how many readers click on a mailto link.
- Gmail automatically converts email addresses to links. This can be a problem if you’ve coded your mailto link with prepopulated fields, like subject lines and email bodies. This poses a problem if your intended reply-to address isn’t the same as the link text.
- Spammers exploit Mailto links. This is UAE Cell Number perhaps the biggest risk, especially in terms of . Spammers often use bots to crawl sites, find mailto links, and inject spammy messages. If your security protocols aren’t tight, you might be on the receiving end of some malicious content, like malware!