How effective is your Call-To-Action? (RT: @simplycast)

May 13, 2009

In our last blog posted titled Break up your email marketing routine, we shared a few tips on how to evaluate and improve your campaigns just by changing a few aspects of your email.

One area that we did not mention was the Call-To-Action (CTA).

The Call-to-Action is arguably one of the most important elements of your email and needs to be evaluated and tweaked just like every other part of a campaign.

Your CTA must stand out to be successful. It needs to be inviting, not intimidating, and ultimately encourage readers to click from the email onto your website or landing page. As an email marketer it should be your overall goal to include design elements with well written copy to achieve a CTA that is distinctive and drives clicks...read on


-
Some times you can spend so much time and energy on the look and feel of the email you forget why you are actually sending it... To get people to click through - the call to action is the most important thing in your content.
Obviously you have to ensure deliverability and subject line, from name pre-headers to get the open too.

when Microsoft brought out Outlook 2007 and used MS Word to render the html, for security reasons, many people were outraged as so much less could be done. But actually it's done email marketing a favour as we now have to concentrate on the click through and do all of the flashy stuff on the web-sites.
Mind you I don't think it even occurred to Microsoft at the time, I think they were just trying to find a way to keep people using Outlook without them having to worry about the massive holes in IE and the many different versions that were being used with previous Outlooks.