Setting the Scene: What is CTA?
Call to action or lovingly referred to by marketers simply by its acronym – CTA. It’s the crux of any good marketing material and is one of the key drivers used to measure the success or failure of a marketing campaign. For example, the call to action of this article might be to get likes on my LinkedIn page or shares, while a sales landing page would be to generate sales. Either way, to calculate the conversion rate or success rate one would add up the traffic volume and then divide that number by the total amount of people that performed the desired outcome.
Websites Lace in a Multitude of Links to Enhance the Experience
When it comes to websites – be it a company’s about us page or a blog post – links to other articles or pages are often strategically placed in. This is done for SEO reasons and as Mara Calvello points out in her article What is a Call to Action? to, “get readers to continue reading content that isn’t fully displayed.”
Now that point is true. Take this site, for example, I might want the reader (you) to know that I’ve written lots of articles on a particular topic, such as split testing strategies in email marketing, or that I offer funnel hacking services. And if you know about these topics… great keep reading, but if you are interested to know a bit more about this then you could click on the aforementioned links to learn more about these subjects.
How Email Marketing Differs from Website Browsing
So, this approach, namely lacing in links to further enhance the web experience is excellent because it keeps the user on the site and engaged. However, when it comes to email marketing, I have seen a different approach work best. Now, I’ve seen a lot of sales emails. Some are short and some are long, but one of the most consistent themes in these emails is the fact that there is not a lot of call to actions sprinkled into the emails. Rather, many times there is one strong call to action by the sign-off.
Therefore, when you are creating your email marketing campaigns, focus more on the word choice for the call to action at the end of the email, rather than trying to hyperlink every second word.
Let’s analyze this is.
First of all, when it comes to email marketing, there is no SEO element. Search engines are not indexing emails. Of course, your email channel is an excellent source for driving traffic to particular pages, which in turn can drive SEO; however, as a direct result, email marketing does not directly boost SEO.
There are No “Advance to Go” Cards
The next point is that when you are sending out email marketing newsletters – and it does not matter if you are trying to sell something or simply drive traffic to your site – the goal is to convince the reader to click (or more likely tap) the CTA link.
You should think of this not like a blog post or website page that might offer multiple CTAs that push people to content that “isn’t fully displayed,” rather the goal in an email newsletter should be building up so that the reader can experience the full funnel without skipping a thing and then ultimately clicking on the CTA.
Remember, marketing is not like Monopoly: there are no “Advance to Go” cards where you get $200 handout.
That said, my belief is that the reader needs to actually read the email first before deciding to take any action. People are less likely to click on the first line of an email before you explain to them what it is that you want them to click on. And I’ve split-tested this with some of my clients and have consistently seen that emails with less CTAs (i.e., one central call to action at the bottom of the email) prove to be just as, if not more effective.
In fact, even on emails that have multiple CTAs, I’ve seen that the vast majority of the clicks occur later on. And by now the reason is clear: you have to let your users experience every step of the funnel and this will help you make more engaging email marketing campaigns.
