Email Marketing News and Tips

Relative linking is more common in website design scenarios where it allows you to use less code to traverse your website directory or file structure, and will let you change domains without having to redefine paths for the different content components. You simply copy your website directory structure to the new domain, and it works. This works because website HTML pages and code are stored in one place, that is your webserver, and therefore establishing a point of reference or relevance. Here is how a relative link looks like:

../images/banner.gif

In the HTML email world things work a little differently due to the fact that when you send out your HTML email, the code is rendered in remote email clients and the relationship to local directories and file structure is lost. Absolute links come very handy in this scenario where you don’t have to worry about the position of your documents or images relative to other documents. An absolute link takes the form of a URL that specifies the exact location of a file on the Internet. Each absolute URL is unique, which means that if you have 2 identical URLs, both will point to the same file.

Creating an absolute link is accomplished by hosting the file you want to link to on the Internet, i.e. a public webserver. BlastWizard allows up to 25 MB of hosting space under each account to enable users to generate those absolute links for their images and other files they wish to embed in the HTML email. Here is an example of an absolute link:

http://imagestore.boomerang.com/banner.gif