Best link shortener for email newsletters

Deliverability: why the domain matters

Spam filters score every domain in an email. Public shortener domains are shared by millions of senders, including spammers, so they carry a reputation you do not control. Some filters treat a bit.ly or tinyurl.com link as a mild negative on its own. A link on your own domain carries only your reputation.

That makes a free custom domain the first filter for this channel. ReSlug, Short.io, Dub, Cuttly and Linkly include one on free plans. Bitly does not until Growth at $29 a month billed annually. TinyURL charges for it on Pro.

Scanner clicks: the analytics problem nobody warns you about

Corporate mail gateways, Gmail's link checks and Apple Mail Privacy Protection all fetch links when a message arrives. On a list of a few thousand subscribers, that can mean hundreds of "clicks" within a minute of sending, before any human has opened the email.

Tools that count those fetches overstate your click-through rate and hide which links actually worked. ReSlug filters bot clicks on every plan. Linkly adds bot and crawler management from its $15 Starter plan. Cuttly shows a bot-click chart from the $25 Single plan. Bitly, Dub, Short.io and Rebrandly do not document bot filtering.

Email-relevant limits compared

Sources: vendor pricing pages, linked below.

Volume: links versus clicks

Newsletters create few links and many clicks. A weekly issue with eight links is about 400 links a year, well inside ReSlug's 500 active links or Short.io's 1,000 links (lifetime). The constraint is tracked clicks. ReSlug tracks 1,000 tracked clicks/mo free and unlimited on Pro. Linkly tracks 500 clicks/mo free and pauses links when the cap is hit, which is dangerous in a newsletter that is already sent. Short.io tracks 50,000 tracked clicks/mo free.

For a list over a few thousand subscribers, budget for a paid plan on whichever tool you pick, and prefer one that keeps redirecting when a cap is reached rather than pausing.

Good practice for links in email

• Use a subdomain of your sending domain, such as l.yourbrand.com, so link reputation and sender reputation reinforce each other.
• Keep UTM parameters in the shortener, not in the visible link. The reader sees a clean URL; your analytics still get the tags.
• Do not use expiring or click-capped links in newsletters. Old issues get forwarded for months.
• Read click reports after bot filtering, or compare the first-minute spike against the rest of the day to estimate scanner traffic.