Campaign links are an often overlooked feature of Keap (formerly Infusionsoft) campaigns, but there are very good reasons why you should be using these all the time.
What are Campaign Links?
When you add a link to an email you can enter the URL directly, or you can use something called a Campaign Link. These are defined at the campaign level so that you can easily use and re-use common links in your emails without having to make sure you are pasting or typing in the correct URL each time.
To create a campaign link follow these steps:
- Make sure you are at the “top level” of your campaign where you can see all your goals and sequences laid out.
- Click on the Actions menu at the top right of the screen.
- Select Links near the bottom of the Actions menu.
- Click on the green Add Link button.
- Enter a name for the link (this is what you will see when adding them to emails), the URL and a description (optional)
- Click on the little floppy disk Save icon.
- Click Close to go back to editing your campaign.
Why You Need to Do This
OK so now you know what Campaign Links are, and how to create them, but why should you care? Well there are a few really good reasons, that make creating, managing, troubleshooting and modifying campaigns a lot easier, and lets face it saved time is saved money!
The main reasons you want to use Campaign Links in Keap are:
- You only need to enter the link once, from then on you just select it from a list. Reducing errors and time checking.
- Humans work much better with words than URLs when identifying which link to use in an email. More error reduction.
- If the link ever changes you only need to change it in the one place and then republish. This is a huge win…
- Much quicker than editing every email that the link is used.
- No mistakes made when updating lots of emails.
When you make the change and publish, all emails that have already been sent will now link to the new URL. That’s right you can fix things retrospectively… this is also handy for time sensitive links, you can change it to a different page after the offer has expired. (this works with normal links in campaign emails too, but it’s way too easy to mess up the link and have it not work if you edit the email directly). Sadly Keap no longer works this way – once an email is sent the link cannot be updated or changed for that sent email, only emails sent after the change.- When you make the change, you get an instant view of all the sequences and emails that had the link it because they will turn light green indicating they have changed and need to be published.
- The links for a campaign are all listed in one place, making it easy to check and review them, and for documentation purposes.
- You can preconfigure all the links in advance before letting your copywriter lose on the emails. – and it doesn’t matter if they are not correct, you can fix them up later and publish after the emails have been created, so long as the links were properly named and the person creating your emails used the right links. This can be a huge time and mistake/rework saver when you are getting pages built in parallel to the campaign.
As you can see the reasons for using campaign links are numerous and really mean that even for simple, single email, campaigns is worth doing. There is literally no downside.
The only minor catch to be aware of is that link tags are still only configurable in each email. The reason for this is that you might have different tags for the same link, depending on which email they click it in. So plan your tags out in advance like a boss!
