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Email Marketing, Business & Monkeys

Yahoo Adding Links to Your Email Content?

February 12th, 2009 | by Ben

Our friend Tanya (dezignsbyt) started an interesting discussion in the MailChimp Jungle.

It seems YahooMail is automatically inserting links onto products that they find in email campaigns. In some cases, it can produce unexpected and unwanted results. She also provides a little workaround to prevent it from interfering with any of your important links.

It’s kind of a useful and cool feature (inserts map links, financial info, etc), but has anyone out there experienced any problems with their email campaigns from this?

I checked my YahooMail account, to see if I could catch this in action.  Saw this in an email from DailyCandy:

while-you-were-sleeping

So I clicked on the little [?] icon in the pop-up, and got this:

yahoo-shortcuts-info

Clicking on their link to the “Shortcuts Help Page” gave me a 404 error, so I found this instead: http://shortcuts.yahoo.com/

which seems to be a Wordpress plugin. But it gives a little more detail about what they’re doing with Y!Shortcuts in general.

Interesting idea with the Flickr integration.

Let us know if you’ve seen this in your own email campaigns, and if you’ve experienced anything weird.

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3 Comments

    • James Lamb says:

      Yeah, we’ve seen it offer up links to other “competitors” in our field. (We’re a non-profit so we’d normally call them colleagues, but in this case, it would appear they’ve purchased these keywords, so to have them appear that way in our fundraising appeals seems downright rude.)

    • Ben says:

      @James – Ok, that’s disturbing. I’ve heard of competitive text ads over to the side of the email (deal with that annoyance myself) but haven’t seen it happen from within the content too.

    • Rich says:

      Is there any way to stop it? Some flag I can put in the email saying don’t do it in “this” email or “this” portion? I’m trying to have white text on a blue background in our header, but the link yahoo puts in is always blue and I can’t find a way to style it. Thanks a lot, Yahoo!

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