Given the massive rise in mobile client usage in our stats over the last few years this looks well worth testing. Shame we can't track them but you can't have everything.

Good work, thank you.

Awesome - I hadn't thought to try and disable the link for desktop clients. That's some smart CSS, and I'm shocked that Outlook obeys it. Nice work.

The table trick to disable the link on desktops is great - but if my phone number link is in the middle of a sentance, how would I keep it that way?

This:
Call 123-456-7890 to get more information.

Becomes:
Call
123-456-7890
to get more information.

This is a great idea. As mobile email use rises, it's a no-brainer to make the telephone number the main call-to-action.

Thanks!
Katie

this is an awesome idea. thanks for posting this tutorial

Can you confirm that you don't have to apply the style to a table?

i.e. would the below work just as well:

Call: +1800-ABC-PIZZA

Wow - Never even thought about this! Thanks for the tip!

This was very informative! Thank you

Okay, that's awesome. I'm thinking right now of some way to get this into a new or upcoming campaign for my clients. Thanks for the background as well as the file at the end.
We've been keeping an eye on the clients used to read our latest messages and the iphone is quite high on the list.

That's a neat trick. Thanks for sharing.

Thanks for the awesome feedback, everyone! Some really good questions here, which I hope I can help out with.

@Scott - You may want to try wrapping the sentence in a 3 column table, then putting the tel: in its own cell, or even 1x1 table. Understandably this is a pretty messy way to go about things, however block-level elements are always going to be problematic like this (especially given that floats are a no-no) :/

@Stephen - Two things here. First, the link has to be in the format: a href="tel:12345678" (no http:// before the tel). It's a bit like mailto: in that it doesn't need to be prefixed by http://.

Secondly, it will work great as a text link, but as mentioned above, you won't be able to disable it in desktop clients unless you wrap it in a block-level element like a table. Remember the table is only being used to 'fool' some clients into ignoring the link - if this isn't a concern, you're more than free to use it like you have above. Hope that helps!

What a great idea and tutorial. With the new online template-maker it would be great to have this as a button even non-coders could easily add to the sidebar of those slick new templates Campaign Monitor is providing.

Is there anyway to get the phone button to just not show up at all in Outlook, et al?

@Ryan - You can try using conditional comments to white it out. Outlook '07/'10 doesn't support display: none; which would be the most suitable solution. Of course :)

display:none was my first attempt. Glad to know it's MS not my own sloppy coding!

Is there anyway to disable phone link or date link in Gmail or Iphone?

Hi herdi, you may want to take a look at this blog post on a couple of possible fixes. Good luck!

Is there any way to do something similar with the address links that automatically get turned into links to the maps app?

Hey Adam! Hmm, there is a special URL scheme for the Apple Maps app, but I'm not sure it would be a good idea to use unless you know that all of your subscribers use iOS or Mac OS: https://developer.apple.com.... There's also a URL scheme for Google Maps: https://developers.google.c...

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The issue I am facing is that after applying the click to call link in the email and then sending the email, when I click the button on my gmail Android app to call, the dialer opens up but the number is followed by a lot of junk characters.

Any solution for this issue?