Add SMS hyperlinks to your website

We can all agree that hyperlinks are everywhere. They lead visitors from one web page or site to another, and it’s how site crawlers like Google and Bing find and index websites.

There are various types of hyperlinks. Standard hyperlinks are the most common, where it directs you to another website. Sometimes you may encounter links that open your default email client. Those are known as email hyperlinks.

SMS Hyperlinks

Click-to-text links (SMS Hyperlinks), direct you to the default text messaging app on your mobile phone. Despite being an easy setup, not many businesses use it as part of their mobile marketing strategy.

Below is a comparison chart of the different types of hyperlinks and its respective sample code.

Why use SMS hyperlinks?

Adobe Analytics reported an 89% increase in smartphone web traffic since 2015, so it’s more important than ever to find mobile-friendly ways for customers to contact you. Consider adding SMS hyperlinks to your:

• Contact page
• Email signatures
• Product, service, or listing pages
• Navigation

Consumers also want more personalised experiences from businesses, according to Accenture. They want 1-on-1 digital conversations—and having a click to text link makes it very easy to personalise their web experience and for them to get in touch with you.

How to set up an SMS hyperlink

Although SMS hyperlinks are similar to email hyperlinks, there’s a caveat.

The difference is in just one HTML symbol (? vs &).

For an Android device:

<a href="sms://+61459333444/?body=hello%20there!">Text us!</a>

For an iPhone device:

<a href="sms://+61459333444/&body=hello%20there!">Text us!</a>

You can also place an SMS keyword into your body copy, so users can opt-in to your mobile database.

Presetting the message body is optional. If you want to include it, we recommend:

• Placing your message into an URL encoder to encode the message. As you can see from above, there’s a %20 between ‘hello’ and ‘there’. This represents a space in a URL. There’s more to it but we won’t get into it here.
• Creating two SMS hyperlinks (one for Android and the other for iOS), and have your developer hide and show the link depending on what device your visitor uses.

If you can’t be bothered by the technical details or don’t have a developer, then presetting the number field is all you need to do.

For both devices (recommended):

<a href="sms://+61459333444/">Text us!</a>

Here’s an important tip: Have your developer hide your hyperlink for desktop visitors.

Bonus: click-to-call links

Last but not least, we want to introduce you to Callable hyperlinks.

They’re similar to SMS hyperlinks, except that they open up your visitor’s dialer app with your mobile number preset.

<a href="tel:+1300-012-004">Call Us!</a>

Most modern browsers can recognise phone numbers on a web page, but this hyperlink is useful for buttons.

Final thoughts

As you can see, adding an SMS hyperlink to your website is easy, and it can make it more convenient for your customer to get in touch with you. Give it a try and let us know how it goes.