How to Effectively Use Calls to Action in Marketing Emails
This is essentially what all your marketing emails need to contain: A Call to Action.
Without a call to action (or potentially a couple calls to action) all your reader has is some information and nothing to do with it. What you need to get from your readers is some interaction with your business, and without calls to action, they won’t know where or how to start this.
LL Bean is great with their white contrasting call to action. They also put their social icons near the top.
Calls to action are pretty much an option for the reader to act. This act could be a variety of things.
Examples of Email Calls to Action
Buy
Obviously the best call to action, but also maybe the hardest to get hits on without some good sales technique first. So maybe consider including some of the following too.
Fossil skips the "buy" call to action and goes with a simple link to view more content.
Subscribe
Get them to subscribe to your newsletter, a good sign that they like you and will buy something in the future. Keep them as a potential customer if you can’t make them a customer on the spot.
Vote
Involve the reader in your company; make them feel like they have some sway with what you do. It’s good for customers to feel important. How about letting them vote from a selection of offers they’d like to see in action?
Follow on Social Networks
Just as good as subscribing to your newsletter, through social networks you can send out regular updates and keep the reader up to date and feeling popular.
View more content
Maybe you have too much information for one email, how about putting just the really interesting bits that grab attention in the email and then getting the reader to voluntarily read more on your website? Perhaps you have a nice video they can watch that sums it all up too.
How Many Calls to Action to Use
Apparently three is the magic number, according to a survey by JangoMail, consistent success was had by the majority of companies using three calls to action in their email marketing campaigns.
Old Navy isn't afraid to use many calls to action in their emails
How to Place and Phrase Calls to Action
Make them obvious. The reader isn’t going to spend any time looking for them, so they need to stand out. Use big buttons or embed them in your text, in bold and a different colour to the rest of the text obviously.
But how should you phrase these all important calls? Avoid wishy-washy politeness features and get to the point is my advice. No, ‘would you like to see our product range?’, rather, ‘Look at our product range here!’ Be forceful and direct. Use action words and emphasise them. At the same time, ‘click here’ doesn’t really cut it. There needs to be more information than that to compel the reader to click. They need to know what they’re clicking on and that it’s the thing they want to click, so keeping them tightly focused to the rest of the content is good.
And another thing, don’t phrase them in a really lengthy way. HubSpot Social Media scientist Dan Zarrella conducted some research and found that the sweet spot for your call to action phrase was between 90 and 150 characters. Just right to process easily while having enough information about what the link does. You really want to get the reader clicking, rather than pondering if they really want to click, or what they’re actually clicking on.
Testing Calls to Action
There are other things you can try with your calls to action, for example personalising them to your readers, so experiment to make sure you’re getting the best possible click count, and of course test, test, test!