How to use custom tracking links for prospects

Your website and CRM can take great advantage of custom tracking links for tracking individual prospects and their actions, e.g. whether or not they opened your website and signed up for your services, and how they got there (e.g. email from Woodpecker, web ad, another website).

You can use custom tracking links (including UTMs) in your campaigns in Woodpecker. You just need a prospect database containing the custom links and a correctly edited email copy that uses them.

TL;DR

Update your prospect database in Woodpecker to include the custom links (e.g. in the Snippet 4 field). This can be done quickly with an upload of your spreadsheet in a CSV, XLS, or XLSX format.
Edit your email copy in the campaign, and add any link to the text fragment that you want to contain the custom link.
Switch to HTML view, find your "any" link, and replace the URL with your selected snippet.

Here is how to accomplish this task in three steps:

Step #1

Create a spreadsheet with your prospect base, including your custom links, and save it to a CSV, XLS, or XLSX file. "Email" and "Custom Link" are the two columns that are required. Optionally, you can add other columns for additional info, such as "First Name", "Company" and "Website".

The custom links in your file should be full addresses, i.e. they should start with http:// or https://.

Example list with custom links in prospects database

Step #2

Upload your CSV, XLS, or XLSX file to Woodpecker (click here to view a short guide to importing spreadsheets)

Select "Update the existing contact with changed or new fields" to allow updating the prospects that are already in your database (if any).
When mapping fields from your file, choose the snippet field that you want to use for the custom links, e.g. Snippet 4.
Finalize your import and view the summary. Check if the prospects were added to your campaign.

Gif of importing a file with prospects to Woodpecker

Step #3

Edit your campaign, and use the selected snippet to create custom links in your emails.

After adding a link to the selected text fragment in your email copy, you will need to replace its address (in HTML view) with your selected snippet.

Type or paste any address (e.g. https://google.com/) into the dialogue box, check-mark the "Track clicks" box (optional), and click the "Add" button.
Click the </> icon "Text → HTML".
Press Ctrl and F (Cmd and F on Mac) to find your link – just type in the text fragment for which you created it.
Highlight the address in your text fragment (between the quotation marks).
Tap <Backspace> on your keyboard, and select your custom link snippet from the panel on the right.
Click the </> icon "HTML → Text" again to go back to normal view.

Remember, that if you don't tick off the 'Track clicks' box in the Woodpecker, your clicks statistics will only be visible in the analytics system which generated UTMs for you.

PREVIEW

You can click "PREVIEW" at the bottom (next to the grey button "Save as Draft") to check if the links are being created properly.

If it's not marked in red color – congratulations, your emails in this campaign will now include a custom link for every prospect.

However, if there's a sign of a missing snippet, click the 'customize' link above, select the text fragment that should contain the custom link, and click the button "Insert/edit link", in the formatting bar.

If the link is in a follow-up email, go back to your campaign's edit view and fix the link there.