There is a video to go with this article, here.
January 2023
Advance Notice. To prevent spammers or bots from exploiting old links, we are going to start automatically expiring any links in emails which are older than 2 years. This change will happen across the board for every client, starting in March 2023. This uses the existing feature (described on this page) which allows clients to set links to expire automatically. If you are already using this feature and have set an expiry different to 24 months this will be retained and not be overwritten. This expiry feature only affects links which have been sent via an email, so links shared using the 'View Page' feature will not be affected.
Best Practice for Keeping Forms Current
If you are interested in the subject of security on forms data and links, there is an article covering Best Practice when dealing with forms that are no longer current and keeping your contact data secure in forms here https://support.vutu.re/hc/en-us/articles/360020560477-Best-Practice-keeping-your-forms-current-and-preventing-old-links-appearing-when-searches-are-done-on-your-firm-s-name-
Set your links to expire
Vuture allows you to set expiration dates on the links you may include in an email, so that all the linked pages on the email will be unreachable a set number of days, weeks or months after the email has been shared.
Important: This is system-wide functionality, so all links included on the email will be affected, including links in the footer such as Unsubscribe and Manage my Preferences. For this reason you will be asked to add the wording to a new landing page for your clients to see if they do click on an expired link. Typical wording for this landing page could be something like:
"This link is from an email which is more than six months old and consequently the links have expired. If you would like further information please contact the Marketing Team at xxx@zzz.com (insert your own firm's info@ or marketing@ email address here)"
To make use of this feature, your Vuture Client Success Manager needs to set it up. You will need to provide them with:
- The number of days, weeks or months after which you want links to expire. For example, if you want links to expire after six months, you can ask them to do that.
- A redirect URL for the page you want your contacts to be sent to if they click on a link after it has expired. This page should be stored in the Global Forms area of your platform so that it never gets deleted by accident. If you do not have access to the Global Forms container, your Customer Success Manager will be able to help you.
Your Customer Success Manager will set up the expiry in "Admin.System.DataStorage.ExpireEmailLinksAfter" and "Admin.System.DataStorage.ExpiredEmailRedirectURL".
Warning: If you have set up a number of weeks after which you want the links to expire, but don't add a page to which to redirect your contacts, they will land on an error page which won't provide much information.
Testing this Feature
Clicking on a link when doing a View Page will not redirect you to new landing pages. You need to use an email that was sent xx weeks ago (where xx is the number of weeks you have set in the ExpireEmailLinksAfter setting. It is not about the age of the campaign, it is about the date the email was sent.
The system populates the form by looking up the SID (the SID identifies the contact by the particular mailing they were sent at that time), so to test, you will need to use an email which has been sent to a contact (and which, therefore, has a SID in the URL).
FAQs
1. When enabling this feature will it affect previously sent emails or only emails from that point onwards?
When the feature is enabled it will expire links from all emails sent from the system including historic ones.
2. If expired links are clicked, will they write back to Vuture reporting or client CRM?
No expired links do not show up in any reporting and are not written back to CRM.
3. Are all links expired or just those that point at Vuture landing pages and forms?
All links in the email will be expired including those that redirect to external sites.
4. Is it possible to expire all previous links from mailings? The expire links option only does this for emails previously sent out but if I want them to be expired/inaccessible on the view page option or if a malicious actor tries to guess the link URLs? Is this possible?
No. You would have to delete the page to stop View Page from working.
