Manage Email Signatures centrally from your Desktop - For All Users

Jesper Frier

Adding more CTAs, and using CTAs that are more clear and obvious, will make your marketing messages more effective in driving conversions - no matter what the conversion might be.

'Click here'

Many email marketers believe that 'Click here' is the ultimate call to action: It’s clear, concise, universally understood and specific in telling the email reader what to do. Just what you want, right?

It’s wrong

As a command, 'click here' is beautiful in its simplicity, but it falls far short as a call to action – the trigger to launch the customer on the complicated path to conversion – because it doesn’t tell your campaign readers what you really want them to do.

Nor does it answer that universal question all readers have that drives so many actions: 'What’s in it for me?'

If your email marketing program still is not delivering the results you need to see, even after you conquer the physical challenges of deliverability and list-building, the problem may lie instead in your call to action, particularly if you rely on 'click here.'

In an marketing message, the call to action has three elements:

the action you want the reader to take,
the words you use to issue the call, and
its physical appearance (text, image, position in your email body)

Here are five strategies to help you cover all your bases:

Avoid 'Click' in your CTA
In the standard email message, you don’t have a lot of space to tell customers why they should click a link. So, the call to action – or CTA, the phrase that will compel the reader to click the link and start down the conversion path – must deliver as much information as possible in just a few words.

That’s where 'click here' fails to deliver.

I can understand how 'click here' got promoted from simple command to lofty CTA, because it’s simpler than saying 'Please click your mouse button on this link so that you will jump from this email to the specially designed landing page we have created for you at our Web site.'

For a retailer, the email message tells the customer, 'Buy now!' However, the buying process doesn’t necessarily start when the reader clicks through to the Web site.

Instead, the link you provide takes the customer to a product page for more information: product descriptions, pricing, image shots, discount amount, and the like.

So, the email message isn’t necessarily asking the customer to commit to a purchase but merely to learn more about the product. If the customer isn’t ready to seal the deal right from the email message, 'click here' might appear to demand a greater commitment than he or she is willing to make. 'Learn more', 'Show me' or 'Here's how' might actually more closely reflect what’s going on in the customer’s head.

An email publisher has a different end result in mind. Newsletters usually contain article abstracts or introductory paragraphs. The action, then, becomes 'Continue to the full story'. Again, 'click here' inadequately expresses the action you want readers to take.

Be realistic and clear about what actions you want your email message to inspire. This will help direct you to design an effective call to action.
Express your CTA Clearly
Once you know the action, your email message should inspire. You must design the call so that it tells the reader what to do and what to expect for doing it.

As with so much else in marketing, a CTA often explains the benefit the reader will get, answering the 'what’s in it for me?' question, and should be expressed as an action. Again, this varies with the email’s type and purpose.

Marketers whose email message generates a product or service purchase should match the CTA to the landing page where the email link will send clickers. If it’s a page of images showing different varieties of the same product, the call could invite the reader this way: 'See all 20 colors here.' Or, if you simply must include the word 'click': 'Click to see all 20 vibrant colors.'

Informational messages – newsletters, bulletins, updates – direct the reader to get the full story at the Web site. Again, you need to tell the reader not only what to do but what he can expect by doing it. 'Learn more techniques to increase click-through rates' is both information and action-oriented, where 'click here' falls flat.

Continue to CTAs that work!

One other shortcoming with using 'click here' as your main CTA: It’s repetitive and boring! Vary the wording to reflect where in the sales cycle your customers probably are, what you’re saying in the body copy that leads up to or surrounds the CTA … Just don’t repeat it more than once in one message.
Sprinkle Links Generously
Obviously, the CTA must be a clickable link. But that cannot be your reader’s only path to the landing page. Giving readers more options will increase your total CTR.

Newsletter readers often click on an article headline as well as the call-to-action link. Make headlines informative and action-oriented, so that they can perform this double duty.

The same is true for commercial emails. The product or service name and images should link directly to the landing page. Never strand a shopper on your home page or a general information site.
Use boldface to Make CTAs Pop
Besides linking the product or service name to your landing page, you should also boldface it to help it catch the eye, especially if you rely on text more than images to tell your story. Boldface makes scanning much easier (see how that got your attention in this article .. ).

You can also boldface action words, key phrases and anything else that can drive the reader’s eye down to the official call to action. (These can be but don’t necessarily have to be hyperlinked.)

Most importantly, though: Boldface the CTA.

Don't sprinkle boldface type too liberally through a message. This will only camouflage the CTA in plain text and make it look like the least-important part. CTAs need to stand out, not blend in.

Increase the font size of the CTA - don't shrink it. Make it prominent and obvious. Use white space to offset or highlight the CTA. If the action at the end of an article abstract is to read the full story, don't just run the last sentence into the CTA. Use a hard return, indent and make it easy to see exactly where the CTA is.
Also drop the CTA higher up in the body
The most obvious place to drop a CTA is at the end of the body. But readers jump around when they read. That’s another reason to boost the number of links to your landing page. But also drop the CTA higher up in the body copy, where appropriate.