What you should know.
When using Account Engagement (Pardot), something that you become adamantly familiar with is emails. They’re woven into every part of digital marketing these days. Within emails, links control interactions, new prospects, and the top-funnel process. So it’s fairly easy to say that links are an incredibly important part of email marketing. But did you know that you might be making a major mistake when incorporating links into your emails that are causing them to be marked as spam? Keeping these simple tips in mind can help you optimize your emails and link integration.

Don’t Overwhelm Prospects
It can often be tempting to try and stuff as many links into your CTAs as possible. However, having too many links can actually overwhelm your prospects, causing them to be less likely to click anything. Focus your message and focus your CTAs as well. With fewer options to get distracted by prospects will be more likely to have meaningful interactions with your content.

Every Link Counts
Another very important thing to keep in mind is that with too many links email deliverability can be affected. Try to keep your email links under 5 total. This includes social media links and linking your logo to your homepage. Count the links in your email and make sure they are staying a low number to help get your content to prospects correctly every time.

Don’t Have Surprise Destinations
When someone clicks on any of your links they should be able to understand what they're getting into. For instance, if a prospect clicks on a link to schedule a demo, and they get taken to an article, they might get frustrated and not dive further into scheduling a demo. That equals lost opportunities to you and your organization. Let your CTAs tell your prospects exactly where they’re going and what they’re getting into.

Tracked Links Are Your Friend
Something that commonly gets glossed over when it comes to links in your Account Engagement (Pardot) emails is custom redirects. It’s easy to grab a link from your website, put it in your emails, and be done. But with custom redirects, you can get information that allows you to go even further in order to maximize deliverability. Your links are limited, why not make them count with a custom redirect.

Always use HTTPS
It's important to keep in mind that Account Engagement (Pardot) rewrites every link that you put into an email so that it is trackable. This usually works well, until it doesn't. Account Engagement (Pardot) works best when you are using HTTPS links, so if you ever find an email is not tracking links make sure to check if the underlying link is an HTTPS link.
