Anne Holland

Best Online Marketing Practices: Do Your Hotlinks Open New Windows (Or Take Over Existing Ones?)

April 11th, 2005

In online marketing it’s the little dinky details that can make or break your campaign’s incremental success.

You work hard on offer, creative, media buys, etc. and then a tiny tech detail can depress results. Example: do you specify all your campaign hotlinks open a New Window?

Unless specified, most hotlinks will just take over an existing window your recipient has open. As MarketingSherpa reader Steve Hardman of SeniorMag.com notes, this can be so annoying for the recipient that it hurts your relationship.

Steve wrote me to say, “I wanted to thank you for one incredibly decent thing you guys do that many other newsletters do not. Your newsletter links open to a blank target.

“It probably doesn’t seem like much, and offering a thanks might seem silly. But when you have multiple windows open as I always do, it is aggravating when a newsletter link takes over an open window that I didn’t intend it to. I may be in the process of updating content or posting through that window, so when a newsletter link takes over, it is annoying to be taken away from that. As a result, I often wait until later to click on a link and ultimately end up not doing so. I know I can always trust your newsletters.”

Admission: Until I got Steve’s note, I had no idea we were doing this thoughtful thing. Turns out Holly Hicks on our email production team came up with the idea. (Go Holly!)

You may want to check with your email team to make sure this is how they are coding your newsletters and campaigns, too.

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