Links in Process Emails - Bad Idea?

[Steve Stauning]

Because we mystery shop hundreds of dealers every year, we see both the good and bad when it comes to process emails (those templated emails you send as part of one of your written processes). We like templates, because they save time and keep dealership salespeople and BDC agents from trying to reinvent the wheel with every email going to a non-responsive prospect.

However, a pet peeve of our grading team (and mine) is the use of multiple links that add no value to the process (and take the prospect further away from what should be your goal of generating a call back).

While we've seen some big mistakes with these useless links (like broken links or even links to the wrong dealer's Facebook page within the same dealer group), today we saw our first link to a dealer's YouTube page where the dealership had been suspended by YouTube, resulting in this message being delivered to the prospect:

"This account has been suspended due to multiple or severe violations of YouTube's policy against spam, gaming, misleading content, or other Terms of Service violations."

While this is bad, why would any dealer even want to send a prospect to their YouTube page in the first place? Are you hoping your prospect will spend the next 3 hours watching videos of guys falling off ladders and completely forget about buying a car?

 

[Alexander Lau]

Best practice dictates, it's never a good idea to confuse or misguide a user with useless or superficial provisions outside of the intent of the marketing piece. This goes for the E-mail itself and corresponding landing page.

https://litmus.com/blog/click-tap-and-touch-a-guide-to-cta-best-practices

PURPOSE
Just like an email needs a purpose, so does a call-to-action. Sure, the purpose is to get subscribers where you want. But, by asking yourself the following three questions, you can get beyond the superficial and figure out the real purpose behind your calls-to-action:

• What do I want a subscriber to do?
• How will they know what to do?
• Why should they do it?

Every call-to-action should provide some value for the reader. Whether or not it is explicitly stated, it should be clear to the subscriber exactly what they get for investing their time in your email and landing page. These questions help to clarify that value and, once answered, you can start thinking about how best to convey that value proposition in a call-to-action.