Linking To eBay? (or other sites)
Are you linking to eBay (or other high profile shopping or banking sites) from within your Email Marketing Campaign?
If so, please read the following advice carefully.
One of the most prevelant cybercrime attacks perpetrated by criminals, is Phishing.
Phising is “the criminally fraudulent process of attempting to acquire sensitive information such as usernames, passwords and credit card details by masquerading as a trustworthy website.”
On of the most common type of Phishing attack, is to send out an email containing links that appear as if they are pointing to a trusted website (e.g. http://www.ebay.co.uk) but in actual fact point to a completely different website - which may on first glance look like ebay - in the hope that unsuspecting recipients will enter their usernames, passwords, and credit card details.
As a direct response to this, the majority of antispam / antivirus software will now scan emails for any links which appear to point to a different website to the link which is displayed. In particualr, if any of these links point to a high profile shopping or banking website (such as ebay), there is a high liklihood that the email will either be blocked (i.e. the recipient will never recieve it) or the recipient may recieve the message - but marked as a possible fraud attempt by the antivirus software.
The reason that this is a particular problem to users of LiveWire Campign, is that all links within your campaigns are tracked, so that you can see who has been clicking onthe link. This is done by redirecting all links through the LiveWire Campaign website, and then immediately redirecting to the actual link destination. This means that if you put a link with the text http://www.ebay.co.uk, and with a destination of http://www.ebay.co.uk - the initial link actually points to http://www.livewirecampaign.co.uk - and there is a high likelihood your email will with be blocked, or will be displayed to your recipients as a possible / probable fraud (which isn’t great marketing!)
The Solution:
Thankfully the solution is quite simple.
If you use a description of the link purpose, rather than the actual address of the link, then the antivirus software will not see the link as potentially fraudulent.
e.g.
<a href="http://stores.shop.ebay.co.uk/my_ebay_shop">Visit my Ebay Shop</a> should be fine
where as <a href="http://stores.shop.ebay.co.uk/my_ebay_shop">http://stores.shop.ebay.co.uk/my_ebay_shop</a> would most likely be blocked or marked as potentially fraudulent.
LiveWire Campaign does scan all email sent out using industry standard antivirus software - and any emails which are detected as potentially looking fraudulent get blocked and returned to the sender (after all, its better that you know about it, than your recipients)
If you have any questions, feel free to ask them in the comments - or if you are having an issue with a specifc campaign, please let us know via email.