Looking for a way to simplify your sign-up processes and increase registration rates? Short links may be the answer. These seemingly simple innovations provide a better user experience and are easier to share and manage than long URLs.
Short links improve omnichannel marketing, event management, and newsletter subscriptions—any activity where quick, easy access to registration forms can improve sign-ups and engagement.
In this post, we cover everything you need to know about using shortened links for boosting registration rates, from benefits and use cases to best practices.
Why use short links for registration?
People use mobile phones more than any other internet device—smartphones account for 62% of web traffic. As a business owner, marketer, or event manager, it’s important to keep this in mind when creating campaigns, and short links can help.
Short URLs are valuable in our mobile-first environment because they allow people to complete registration processes quickly from their phones. They’re also easy to share across channels, so they can help you reach broader audiences.
Let’s highlight some of the most significant benefits of using short links in your registration process.
Better user experience
Long URLs are bulky and difficult to remember. As such, they can significantly impact customer experiences and, consequently, registration rates.
Short links are more user-friendly because they are easier to read and share. They improve the user experience by reducing visual clutter and allowing audiences to access registration forms seamlessly.
Shortened links are also easier to remember. This saves customers from the hassle of searching for your URL later if they can’t register immediately.
Enhanced tracking and analytics
With marketing budgets on a downward trend (down from 9.1% of revenue in 2023 to 7.7% in 2024), you can’t afford to spend money on channels or marketing strategies that don’t register returns. You need to invest in solutions that help you gauge campaign performance.
Short links created with Bitly offer enhanced tracking and detailed analytics capabilities. Bitly Links give you access to analytics including:
- Total engagements (link clicks)
- Engagements in the last week
- Week-over-week change
- Engagements by location (country and city level—available on some paid plans)
- Engagements by device type (iOS or Android)
- Engagements by referring source
It’s important to track short link analytics, as they provide valuable insights into your audience and what resonates with them. If you use unique short links in each marketing channel, you can easily identify the channels that drive the most sign-ups. This way, you get to make well-informed decisions regarding resource allocation.
Let’s say you’re promoting your event on social media, using the same registration link across Facebook, Instagram, and X. With Bitly Analytics, you can see which platform garnered the most interest. If your link got 3,200 engagements from Instagram but only 120 from Facebook and 300 from X, it may signal that you could be better served by investing more in Instagram sponsored posts and downsizing your resource allocation for Facebook and X.
Increased trust and click rates
If you’ve been wondering how to increase click-through rates (CTRs), short URLs can help. They’re cleaner and more professional-looking than bulky, long URLs, which may encourage more people to click.
You can further increase trust by branding them with your own domain. Customized short links appear more credible and aligned with your brand, encouraging users to engage with them.
Common use cases for registration short links
Short links are incredibly versatile. You can easily adapt them to different contexts to optimize engagement and audience experience.
Here are some ideas on how to use short links for registrations:
Event sign-ups
Short links can increase event sign-ups by simplifying the registration process. They’re direct and easy to remember, which minimizes the hassle of manually typing them and makes it easy for potential attendees to register hours or even days after seeing them.
To increase event visibility and attendee numbers, use these links in multiple channels, including social media platforms, emails, and promotional materials like flyers and billboards.
Newsletter subscriptions
Newsletters provide direct access to people who may be interested in your brand, giving you a chance to showcase your value to the consumers who are most likely to convert.
However, getting people to sign up for newsletters can be challenging. It’s even harder if you use long links, as they may appear spammy and untrustworthy.
Using custom short links for your newsletter signups can look more credible. They also make it easy for you to share subscription URLs across different mediums since they fit neatly into small spaces—so you can seamlessly add them to social media posts and profiles without worrying about line breaks or character limits!
Gated content downloads
Short links can also provide access to gated content, like whitepapers, ebooks, or research reports. Using them for this purpose enhances your audience’s experience while providing insights into the content that drives sign-ups.
Understanding what resonates the most helps you make better decisions in future campaigns. For instance, if you find that more people register when you offer reports on how to leverage technology in business, you can focus your resources on developing similar pieces of content.
Product demos
Short links can help your product demo registration efforts when incorporated into marketing mediums like targeted email campaigns or social media ads.
If you use custom-branded short links, you can immediately instill greater confidence in your audience, as they know the link is legitimate. Short URLs are also easier to share or manually enter than long links, which can encourage more potential customers to take action. (And more engagement can lead to more conversions from the marketing mediums!)
Consider this: You’re scrolling through social media and see a few marketing images for a new product that include demo sign-up URLs right on the image. Which product demo registration link are you more likely to follow through with?
yourbrnd.co/demo
http://www.yourbrand.com/schedule-productx-demo
Most likely, you chose the first one. The short URL is easy to remember and type into your browser (a must if you’re pulling it from an image), whereas the longer URL may cause you to go back and forth a few times to make sure you’ve entered it correctly.
Best practices for creating short links for registration forms
While short links are inherently designed to streamline registration processes, you also have a part to play. Follow short URL best practices to optimize your campaigns for higher engagement and better tracking. Here are some tips to keep in mind:
Use branded links for credibility
Branded links appear more trustworthy and are easier to recognize than generic ones because they’re associated with a specific name. So, they have the potential to receive more clicks.
To increase your click-through rates, shorten your URLs with a service that allows you to customize links, like Bitly. With Bitly branded links, you get premium features to build brand awareness and help increase conversions by replacing the “bit.ly” domain with your own branded domain.
Keep links simple and descriptive
Ensure your links are concise and give audiences an idea of what to expect on the other end of a click. A great way to ensure this is to customize the back half of the URL with meaningful keywords to show audiences what to expect when clicking through. With registration links, this could look something like yourURL.com/signup or yourURL.com/register.
Implement UTM parameters
Urchin tracking module (UTM) parameters reveal who visits your webpage and where they’re coming from—they track the source, medium, campaigns, terms, and content of your web traffic. Adding these parameters to shortened URLs can help you better monitor the performance of registration campaigns.
With custom shorteners like Bitly, you don’t have to give up your short URL when you incorporate these tags. When you add Bitly UTM parameters to your links, you get the functionality of both worlds—short links that are more palatable for your audience and enhanced tracking to give you a better picture of how people interact with your links!
Drive more registrations for your campaigns with Bitly short links
Using short links for registration processes is a great move if you want to maximize your sign-ups. Shortened links are easy to read, share, and remember, so they can enhance audience experiences and encourage more engagement—especially when combined with a reliable URL-shortening service.
With Bitly Links, it’s easy to transform long URLs into cleaner, professional-looking links that align with your brand. These short links fit perfectly into any medium, making them sharable and memorable—but that’s not all. You also get real-time insights on each link through Bitly Analytics, helping visualize what drives your audience to sign up for events, products, or services, so you can improve future registration campaigns.
Get started with Bitly today to elevate registration campaigns with short, custom links!
