Email is still the highest-ROI marketing channel for most businesses — but only if you know what's actually working. Raw long URLs clutter your copy, UTM strings alarm spam filters, and most email platforms show "clicks" without telling you which link inside the email drove them. A link shortener fixes all three problems at once.
This guide covers how to use a link shortener specifically for email marketing: how to set it up, what to track, and what separates a professional workflow from the kind that produces messy analytics six months later.
Why long URLs in email are a liability
A link like https://yourshop.com/products/summer-sale?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=june-promo&utm_content=header-cta is 130+ characters. In plain-text email previews it wraps across lines. In HTML emails it forces the link element to stretch. In some clients, certain email security gateways wrap it again in their own URL, creating double-redirect chains that break your analytics.
A branded short link like truthylink.com/june-sale eliminates all of that. The UTM parameters are still there — they're attached to the destination URL inside the link shortener, not visible in the email.
The right workflow: build UTM URLs first, shorten second
The order matters. Here's the sequence that keeps your data clean:
- Write your destination URL (e.g.
https://yoursite.com/landing-page) - Add UTM parameters for source, medium, campaign, and — crucially — content (to distinguish individual links within the same email)
- Paste the full UTM URL into Truthylink and create a short link
- Use the short link in your email, not the raw URL
The result: your email platform reports clicks on the short link. Truthylink logs the raw click count, bot-filtered click count, and referrer. GA4 or whatever analytics you use records the correct UTM source. You have three independent data points for every click, which is useful when troubleshooting discrepancies.
Using utm_content to identify individual links
Most email newsletters have more than one link: a header CTA, a body link mid-article, a footer button. They might all go to the same destination, but you want to know which placement drove clicks.
utm_content is the parameter for this. Examples:
| Link location | utm_content value |
|---|---|
| Header image / banner | header-banner |
| First in-body CTA | body-cta-1 |
| Mid-article link | mid-article |
| Footer button | footer-button |
Each of these gets its own shortened link. In your analytics you can then compare click rates by position, not just by campaign — which is where the genuinely useful insights live. "The footer button converted 3× better than the header CTA" is an actionable finding.
Bot filtering: why your email click count is probably wrong
Email security gateways — Microsoft Defender, Proofpoint, Barracuda — follow every link in every email they process. This is done by automated systems, not humans, to check for phishing. The result is that raw click data from your ESP (email service provider) can be inflated by 10–40% depending on your audience's corporate email infrastructure.
Truthylink filters bots using user-agent matching and click pattern detection. The click count shown in your dashboard is the human-only count. This matters when you're making decisions like "should we scale this campaign?" based on click data — you want to be optimising against real engagement, not scanner noise.
Custom slugs for email campaign links
A slug like truthylink.com/june-promo is easier to include in plain-text email footers, printed references, or social posts that echo the same campaign. It also looks more deliberate than an auto-generated alphanumeric slug — which signals to recipients that the link was crafted for them, not generated by automation.
Custom slugs are available on Pro and Business plans. For high-volume teams sending multiple campaigns per week, the naming convention pays off in reporting clarity alone.
What to check in your analytics after each send
After your email goes out, you should be able to answer all of these questions from your Truthylink dashboard plus your email platform:
- How many unique humans clicked? (Truthylink bot-filtered count)
- Which link placement drove the most clicks? (utm_content breakdown in GA4)
- What time of day did clicks peak? (useful for optimising your send time)
- Where did clickers come from geographically? (for localisation decisions)
- Did the click rate differ between link placements? (A/B test your CTAs)
A good link shortener makes this data available without requiring you to bounce between five tools. The free UTM builder on Truthylink generates the full UTM URL in one step, so the workflow from "I want to track this" to "link is ready to paste" takes about 30 seconds.
One thing most email marketers skip
Test the full redirect chain before you send. Create your short link, open a private browser window, click it, and verify: (a) you land on the right page, (b) the UTM values show up in GA4 Realtime. It takes two minutes and has saved more campaigns from bad data than any other habit. Link shorteners preserve UTM parameters across redirects, but some CDNs and landing page platforms strip query strings — you need to catch that before you mail 50,000 people.