According to The Radicati Group’s Email Statistics Report, over 100 billion emails are sent and received every day. That’s certainly a lot of competition for inbox supremacy! With so much competition for your subscribers attention, you’ll want to do everything you can to guarantee that yours is the email that they choose to read.
A clever subject line and an eye catching design can go some way towards ensuring that your email will be opened and read but, if you want your readers to actually click through the email, you’ll need a compelling call to action (CTA). A good CTA will improve customer engagement and drive sales. Here are some tips to help you create the best call to action for your business:
Placement Can Vary
There are no hard and fast rules when it comes to where you should place your call to action in the body of your emails. While many companies place their CTA at the bottom of emails, you might find that yours works better in the middle or even at the top.
The only way you’ll know for sure what CTA placement works best for you is by testing, but there are a few things you can consider. In shorter emails, a call to action featured prominently in the email’s body tends to work best, like in this example from TK Maxx:
The reader can’t fail to notice the ‘SHOP NOW’ button dominating the centre of this email. However, in longer emails, multiple CTAs seem to work best. Take this example from Pizza Express:
As you can see, the pink CTA buttons feature throughout this email. No matter how much of the email the customer chooses to read, they should still encounter a call to action.
Design For The Customer
CTAs usually consist of a text link, or a clickable button. If you’re undecided about which one would be best for your business, think about your customers and how they usually consume your emails. For example, if most of your customers read your emails on mobile, you should use a dominant button that will stand out (and be easy to click) on a small screen. This is how the TK Maxx example I used earlier looks on a mobile:
They have ensured that the CTA button is given dominance.
The colour that you use for your CTA should stand out, but still be representative of the colours used in your company’s branding.
Keep It Short
When it comes to CTAs, there’s one thing that’s universal: they need to be short. A good call to action should distil the action that the reader needs to take into 5 words or less. Any more than that, and you risk confusing or losing the attention of your reader.
As you can see from these examples, most CTAs use two words:
L’Occitane – ‘Shop Now’
Layered – ‘Enter Now’
Travel Bird – ‘Read More’
One thing to bear in mind, the words in the call to action need to represent what’s been said in the body of the email, and the page it links to should be what the customer expects after reading the email. For example, if your CTA reads ‘Buy Now’, the page it links to should feature the product in question, and not the home page.
The call to action is arguably the most important part of an email campaign. After all, it’s the part that encourages your customers to take the desired action. If you take the time to plan (and test) your CTAs, you’ll see just how powerful they can be.
