Stop sending emails with broken links

This actually happens more than you’d think.

A while ago, I posted something about using Clearbit to enrich your top-of-funnel leads. It got decent traction, and it was featured in the famous french growth hacking newsletter Growth Room.

I was thrilled. Featured in the excellent GrowthRoom newsletter on my 1st medium post. I mean that was huge. And then this happened.

Ouch. Painful.

Turns out our friends at Growth Room forgot to escape a space character (%20) at the end of the URL, resulting in a brutal 404 error for anyone clicking the link to my post.

How awful right?

A few days later, I checked my inbox, filled with various newsletters I never read.

Turns out most of them had a broken link in them. I checked 178 emails sent with various Email Service Providers (ESPs). 29 had a broken link. Some were insignificant link (that bottom of email facebook page link for ex.), while others were straight 404s on a product link.

I've scaled this quite a bit since. Built a little bot that crawled hundreds of thousands of websites & signs up to their newsletter. I received north of 10k emails so far. All parsed and analysed & stored.

Six percent of these emails have a broken link. Six percent. That's huge.

Makes sense when you think about it. If you’ve ever written a newsletter, your average number of links is anywhere between 10 and 50. If you’ve been dealing with links for a while, you’ve learnt to systematically copy-paste, but sometimes a weird character makes his way into the email builder, and voilà: broken link.

Whether the broken link is on your main Call To Action, or somewhere in the never-clicked-on footer links, the thing with broken links is they have a number of very bad consequences:

1. Your subscribers get a 404 error, which really sucks, especially if you’re selling something.
2. In most of the cases, you have no idea it’s a broken link, and you could be re-using that same broken link several times (in transactional emails for example)
3. You links might not show an error to your contacts, but your tracking parameters could be off, and your tracking effectively inaccurate.

Checking every single one of your links takes an insane amount of time. Especially if you’re using tracking parameters on top of your URLs to track onsite user behaviour (think of e-commerce for example, that often links directly to products).

At the moment, I'm working on a more in-depth analysis of these emails with Salesdorado. Stay tuned! :)