Linkkit Team
Building the future of link management and analytics.
The team at Kova — a direct-to-consumer skincare brand — had a problem they didn't know they had.
Their email campaigns were performing below industry average on click-through rate. Open rates were solid. Subject lines were working. But somewhere between opening the email and clicking the link, they were losing people.
Their links looked like this:
bit.ly/3xK9pQ
The hypothesis
Priya, their head of marketing, had a simple theory. Their audience — health-conscious consumers who'd paid £80 for a moisturiser — were being sent links that looked like they could come from anyone.
"We were asking people who'd paid £80 for a moisturiser to click a link that looked like it was from a 2012 spam email. It doesn't make sense when you say it out loud."
— Priya, Head of Marketing at Kova
The test
Priya ran a clean A/B test over four email sends. Control: links using the existing bit.ly domain. Variant: links using Kova's branded domain — shop.kovaskin.com — through Linkkit. Everything else was identical.
The results
Metric | Control (bit.ly) | Variant (branded) | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
Click-through rate | 2.6% | 3.5% | +34.6% |
Clicks per send | 1,820 | 2,450 | +630 clicks |
Revenue per send | £4,100 | £5,520 | +£1,420 |
"When I saw 34% I went back and checked the data three times. But it held up across all four sends. Of course people are more likely to click a link from kovaskin.com than from bit.ly."
— Priya
The takeaway
Branded links aren't just about aesthetics. In an environment where email clients flag suspicious links and readers are cautious — a branded domain is a trust signal that directly impacts click-through rate.
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