Understanding Email vs Text Link Tracking — Switchboard

Link tracking can drastically change how your business decides to spend its time and money.

Have you found yourself frustrated by the lack of clarity or complete inability to track conversations on the links you include in text messages to your clients? No matter what communication channel you use, being able to track exactly which customers interact with links you send provides essential information about who is interested and how you should follow up. 

Sifting through all the different link tracking options currently available on the market to find a transparent, useful option can be time consuming. Whether you’re new to link tracking or currently using a service, it’s important to understand the different options available and choose the right one for each channel.

What is Email Link Tracking?

One way to track links you sent is by email link tracking. This is a popular method normally used when a company sends a link they want their buyers to interact with via email. For businesses, these links usually send people to external websites with information on specials or limited time discounts, new items in stock, product releases and more. 

Unfortunately, the fatal flaw with email link tracking for audience insights is the channel itself. Email engagement rate is simply not as high as it used to be. 

The email inbox has also turned into a place of vexation for most people, with more emails than ever filtered and sorted before people even see them. The average person receives around 121 emails a day from campaigns and businesses across America, spamming their inbox and burying the relevant emails they need for work and life. Email platforms like Gmail have counteracted this with their promotional email folder in order to enhance the user's experience. Even if people do get around to checking these promotional emails, they usually just skim them for important information, missing your valuable tracking link. 

Since the rate at which people check emails is lower than ever, a different channel is needed to send important links. The best way to ensure that your trackable links are being seen and clicked on is to send them directly to a person via text.

What is Individualized Text Link Tracking?

Individualized text link tracking is a feature built into our platform that allows you to see exactly which contacts have clicked through a link included in a text message. This technology provides the ability to identify specific contacts who have clicked a link that would likely never have been seen at all if sent over email. 

This link tracking feature is easy to use and takes no time to set up. It all starts with our platform’s Custom URL Shortener. Choose from a wide variety of different domain names available to choose from, including links specific to go to webpages, surveys, and more. Using a custom URL shortener will help your link look safe to click on and prevent carriers from flagging your messages as spam as they often do with free online shortener tools such as bit.ly. 

Why you should use Switchboard Individualized Text Link Tracking 

By using our Individualized Text Link Tracking, you exponentially increase the odds of your links being clicked on, and are able to pinpoint the exact people who interacted with it.

The stats say it all. According to MailChimp, the average open rate of political emails is 22.94% with only a 2.37% click-through rate. Since texting provides communication on the channel people respond to most often and care about the most, the open rates are much higher. Texts have an average total open rate of 95%, and an average response rate ranging from 10–20%, which is almost 10x higher engagement than email. If you are going to be spending part of your budget on sending links with the goal of people interacting with them, text is the proven way to go. 

Another reason our Individualized Link Tracking is the best option is that you can easily find and pull contacts who interact with your content. People who click a link shortened with our Custom URL Shortener will have a tag automatically added to them in the system. This allows you to easily filter and see all the contacts who have engaged with your link, which can help your campaign make valuable decisions on future outreach.

Bottom Line

If you are unsure about the performance of your links or aren’t getting the engagement you want, then you are missing out on valuable data that allows you to make smart outreach decisions. By using our Individualized Text Link Tracking tool, your message will get through while others get lost in the pile.

Take the first step today and sign up with Switchboard at myswitchboard.com to start texting out trackable links today! If you have any questions about how texting can best work for you, contact our sales team at sales@myswitchboard.com, or text us at 833-245-2534.