Cohousing-L Mailing List: URL's in email [was: Marketing efforts that worked well?

[Fred H Olson (fholson]

On 6/30/14 Ann Zabaldo wrote:

>You mention you have a website but you don't have a link to it in your
>email that I found.  I could search for it but I'm not so inclined to
>spend my time doing that this morning. Did you just lose a potential
>member?

I second this.  Spread your URL around as much as possible, make it as
easy as possible to access. (And of course put as much useful info on
it as possible.)  Some people will check out your website which requires
zero commitment and little effort and based on that decide to
make more of a commitment and little more effort by calling, coming to
an event or whatever.  It may also just give them some background so the
next time your paths cross they will be more receptive.

I urge putting your community's URL in your "signature" - that block of
text that is added automatically to every email you write. (How this is
done depends on what email program you use - youll have to look around.)

Also I STRONGLY URGE always including the "http://"; part of URLs in
email.  This makes them more consistantly "clickable".

Note that Jerry's URL in the original message in this thread
is not "clickable" in the list's archives.
See http://lists.cohousing.org/archives/cohousing-l/msg37382.html

Such URL's are still useable by copy/pasting but the extra step makes
it less likely people will go to the site.

Details:
In order to be treated by software as a link to a web site, software has
to know it is a URL. The archane "http://"; tells software that.
It is not needed if the rest is put in the location bar of a browser
because the contest tell software 'this is a url'

Some email programs will treat anything that starts with "www." as a URL
but that is iffy. Not all URL's have "www." not everything with "www." is
a URL.  URL's in printed on paper etc do not require the "http://";
since they will have to be entered into a location bar to be used.

Fred


--
Fred H. Olson  Minneapolis,MN 55411  USA        (near north Mpls)
     Email:        fholson at cohousing.org      612-588-9532
My Link Pg: http://fholson.cohousing.org         My org:
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