Creating effective calls-to-action with email marketing

Excerpted from ConvUrgency.com's Smart Email Marketing Guide

So we’ve talked about general content enough, now I’d like to focus on a few specifics. First of all, let’s consider your calls-to-action. These are the images and links that people will click on to perform the intended action of your email, whether that's register for something, buying something, or anything else.

I see a number of mistakes that marketers make very often when writing calls-to-action. The most common is the use of the infamous 'click here'. For example:

Click here to register for our great event!

Or

Click here to download our complimentary e-book!

There are two problems with these calls-to-action:

1. 'Click here' blindness. I bet that if there were some way to actually measure it, we would find that 'click here' is the most common phrase on the Internet. Because of this, many people's eye skip over this, because they associate it with an ad.
2. Lack of context. When a subscriber is scanning your email, 'click here' has no result associated with it, unless they pause to read the entire sentence. Therefore they have no reason to 'click here'. And because most people do indeed scan, that means that you'll get less clicks.

So rewrite your calls-to-action to actually indicate action of some sort. The two examples I've given can be rewritten as:

Register now for our great event!

Or

Download our complimentary e-book!

Another faux-pas I see quite regularly is placing all calls-to-action in images. Yes, they look quite fancy, but as I've already mentioned, most clients block images by default. So if the subscriber is scanning your email to determine if they want to open it, they won't actually see anything to be done with the email.

One other quick tip I can share with you, is to offer multiple calls-to-action (even for the same thing) in different locations within the email. Perhaps you have a link to Register now! at the top of the left-side column to grab people right away, but also another at the bottom of the event description in the main column, for the subscriber to click on right away when they're done reading. The formula is simple: if there are more links to click on, there's a greater chance of the person clicking!

Excerpted from ConvUrgency.com's Smart Email Marketing Guide