Best practices communicating links in email

A policy I've seen used by some banks and government agencies in the Netherlands is never to include any links in mails, but just to refer to "our website" or "our webportal".

The main idea here is that they're explicitly telling customers never to click on any links in emails (supposedly) coming from them. This way they hope to reduce the chance of people visiting links mentioned in phishing mails and entering their credentials there.

People are always forced to enter the URL of the webpage in their browser (or use bookmarks), which can be a bit of a drawback looking at it from an UX perspective, but it can work as a security measure.

Unfortunately, I have no idea how effective this is, and thus if it's a useful strategy.

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Email