How to Make URLs Clickable by AOL Subscribers
Web Marketing Today, Issue 120, January 7, 2003
AOL 8.0 has improved the e-mail program substantially. It now reads HTML e-mail quite well. However, it ain't there yet!
Unlike most other e-mail programs, AOL still doesn't show URLs as clickable links in text-only e-mail.
I've just moved to a new e-mail listserver and am committed to confirmed opt-in (so-called "double opt-in). My listserver sends out "confirm your subscription messages" in text only. When I started receiving e-mail from AOL users sending me the confirmation link rather than just clicking on it I was mystified. But when an AOL newbie wrote, "I don't know how to copy and paste anything," the lights started to go on.
I determined that the proportion of unconfirmed subscribers was 27% greater among AOL subscribers than among my subscribers in general. I had a problem.
I estimated that 8.0% of my subscriber base came from AOL. The proportion for your newsletter is probably higher than that, since mine reflects strongly the entrepreneurial nature of my marketing and small business readers.
Here was my solution -- which many of you have known for years. Show the crucial confirmation link in two formats -- a regular URL and a special text link that is clickable in AOL text e-mail messages. Here's the syntax:
AOL users <a href="http://confirmationlink.com">click here</a>
What AOL users see is: AOL users click here
I'm not going to produce double links for all the URLs in my newsletters -- I hope AOL users will select HTML format for my newsletters -- but on the crucial confirmation link, I'm willing to bend over backwards to make it easy for AOL users to confirm their subscriptions.
