How Not To Stuff-up Your Email Deliverability: The New Gmail Clickable Link Format

Reading time: 1 – 2 minutes

Apparently Gmail is now displaying clickable links in TEXT emails (which are ugly, but more deliverable than HTML emails) only when the link contains all _lowercase letters. Also the link must include “www.”

Thus a valid link in Google’s gmail would be formatted thus:

http://www.yourwebsite.com

or (maybe) www.yourwebsite.com

You’ll get not argument from me that www. is more attractive to the eye.  In my experience using the http:// prefix results in clickable links more often than using www.  alone.   That said, the safest thing to do is probably to use both in most situations.  Thus all links should be prefixed:  “http://www.“

Remember, gmail is ignoring capitalizations and using capital letters in your urls will, I surmise, result in broken or unclickable links.  If your actual URL includes capitals, write them in lowercase.

You’ll have to test this one for yourself.   Just a heads-up.

The post author, Loren Woirhaye writes sales copy and creates marketing systems for business clients who want to slash customer acquisition costs and position their businesses For 20%-30% sales growth in the next 12-18 months. He writes regularly about marketing and life at his Entrepreneur Blog.