Tip Three – Publishing a Winning Newsletter: Links & Images
Learning the ins and outs of doing an email newsletter takes time. When I first started publishing email newsletters, I made many mistakes. I want to save you some time and headaches. Last week I talked about formatting in Tip Two-Publishing a Winning Newsletter: Formatting. This week I will talk about links and images. I hope you find this information helpful.
Links and Images
One of my first lessons in publishing newsletters was learning the difference between an absolute link and a relative link. An absolute link is the full url including the protocol (http://). A relative link assumes a relationship between the page you are linking to and the website you are viewing and, therefore, does not include the protocol or the domain name.
An absolute link: http://www.yourdomainname.com/aboutus.html
Relative link: aboutus.html
The absolute link can be copied and pasted into the browser. The relative link cannot, it does not provide the source of where the page is located. Relative links are fine within a website and are generally recommended; however, you do not want to use them in your emails or newsletters. This may seem like common sense, but if you are creating your newsletter as a web page first in a WYSIWYG editor like dreamweaver, the program may automatically insert a relative link. Make sure that all your links are absolute links in your newsletters, as well as, your emails.
When you are creating links in your email or newsletter, do not use words like “click here”, keywords or titles. Although, using keywords and titles are fine (“click here” should never be used) within a website, when you are sending emails or newsletter it is best to provide the full url to the page you are pointing to and just make it a link. As I explained in Tip Two of Publishing a Winning Newsletter, some email accounts strip links. If you provide the full url, then it can be copied and pasted into the browser if the link don’t work.
All of the above also holds true for images. Always make sure the links are absolute links and don’t forget to set an “alt” for each image. The “alt” is important if the email account does not allow the viewing of images. The subscriber will then at least see a description of the image they cannot view.
Next week I will be writing about content for your newsletter.
