Autopilot: Add and customize links

How to add a link

Advanced Editor

Learn how to add a link using the Advanced Editor here.

Basic Editor

You can add links to emails by selecting the text that you want to add the link to, and then clicking the "Insert / Edit Link" button:

How to customize a link

You can customize links using personalization variables (sometimes called "merge tags") and fallbacks. This allows you to:

• direct contacts to more targeted URLs based on their characteristics; or
• pass information about the contact to another system via the URL. For example, some form builders allow you to pre-populate fields via the URL.

Let's take a look at a very simple example:

https://www.autopilothq.com/promotion/--mailing state=other--

Will output the following for someone with 'California' in the mailing state field:

https://www.autopilothq.com/promotion/california

And the following for someone with no value in the mailing state field:

https://www.autopilothq.com/promotion/other

In addition to using a personalization variable as part of a URL (as demonstrated above), you can also insert an entire URL as a personalization variable. For example, you might have a personalization variable called "Landing Page" where you pass in a complete URL such as http://www.uniquelandingpage.com/123. Please note that you must include "http://" in the link. You can do this by either:

• including it in the field value itself; or
• adding http:// to the link in the email editor, if the field value does not contain http://.

Note that if you're inserting a custom variable, consider using the variable control (demonstrated here) to insert it into the body, and then cut and paste it into the link, to ensure that you have formatted it correctly. For example, variables with spaces in them (e.g --First Name--) need to keep those spaces. However, note that capitalization doesn't matter; so you could type --first name-- and it will still work.