We’ve all done it before. You hit send on the email and watch it finish sending. Then you start getting the complaints from subscribers. The link you sent doesn’t work. That is when your adreniline kicks in and you panic!
The industry best practice is to send a new campaign out to the list with the corrected link. You might include [CORRECTED] in the subject line to help clarify that there was something wrong with the first campaign but ultimately you and I both know that you have lost some people and some money.
There is a way to change the link after it has been sent. Afterall, the link that is actually inserted into the outbound email is not the link you put into the editor. The link is a tracking link that likely looks something like this: http://www.yourdomain.com/link.php?M=238603&N=2596&L=22840&F=H. These links are unique to each email to assist the Interspire software with tracking which of your contacts click on which link. They reference back, via the database, to the original link you inserted into the email editor.
You can change the link by visiting your database tables via phpMyAdmin and going to the table: email_links
In this table I find it most useful to sort the table in reverse order by link ID so I can quickly see the most recent links I’ve created.
Then, just double click in that field and edit the link to the correct link. That is it. Now when people open the original email campaign and click on their tracking link it will take them to the corrected link you insert into the database.
The only potential adverse effect is that you won’t be able to track how many clicks on that link came before or after you made the change in the database. Interspire Email Marketer will see any clicks on that LinkID as being the same and will report it as such in your stats.