A strong Call To Action is critical to your email marketing success. Here are some ideas to help you get more from your next email marketing campaign by strengthening your email’s call to action (CTA).
The most commonly used call to action is still the inherently logical “Click Here” however testing proves that this all too common CTA isn’t the best performer for your email.
Have you used this recently? If so, here is a short but pointed rationale for improving your call to action to engage more subscribers on your email list to click through to your website.
First it breaks with fundamentals of email marketing. For starters, it fails to adequately answer the question in every busy subscribers mind… “who cares?” –there is no promise or offer made in the blanket statement… “click here” –directive, simple, and logical, yes… but optimal direct response? Not really.
One simple method for devising your optimal call to action is to think about some of the principles in search engine optimization. In good SEO, you would choose keywords to focus on that your customers are likely to think about and search on when looking for your product or service. Email shouldn’t be all that different conceptually, and for good reason –customer orientation –think like the customer. Your customer isn’t out looking to click links… they are interested in relevant, valuable content and opportunities.
Another variant on “click here” is “buy now” –while this to is good and directive, it is not falls short… it doesnt answer the question “what’s in it for me?” Sure, as the marketer you want the email list subscriber to “buy now” –but is that what the customer starts with?
First… Your first objective is to get the click to the website, then to engage in conversion, so your CTA in the email body should be a “killer offer” that compels the click. Of course the purchase funnel collapses without getting from email to website, so settling for “click here” is an expensive proposition… consider “see dozens of limited availability selections now!” instead.
Second…add calls to action. In a recent study we performed the number of clickalbe links in email bodies is up to five for retailers, and somewhat less for the average mailer, but in all cases the number of links is up. Why… it works. You can use multiple treatments and CTA’s to generate the click… why settle for just one.
Finally, you need to get send that click to the right place, do you drop everyone on the home page? The landing page should be as well engineered as the subject line and email body itself. If you take them from a highly engineered experience to a “generic” page subsequently, conversions will suffer. At a minimum be sure to sample the “keywords” in the CTA on your landing page.
Change up your call to action in your next email marketing campaign, and watch the results improve.