This post ends the "Call to Action" series I started a few days ago (you can find the links below).
Today I'm going to talk about good practices for location and aspect in CTAs, the two last main parameters that have influence in CTA performance.
The obvious place to locate your CTA is at the end of your e-mail. That's not bad, but not all of your readers will read your whole message, so maybe a lot of them don't even get to see the CTA. It's advisable to put it in higher positions of the message body too.
Why settle for a single CTA? You can use several links and graphics at different locations in your e-mail body, all pointing to your landing page. Use several options, for example: a link in the header, a left aligned graphic and a final sentence each of them pointing to your landing page. You don't know which will be more effective, so don't limit yourself, but don't abuse neither. It is sometimes interesting to have a first CTA-link in the first two lines of your content.
A word of caution when using images: take into account that images are probably initially blocked in your recipient's e-mail client; so don't rely on having them visible, as I've already pointed in this blog before. Anyway always use an ALT attribute. At least they will read the purpose of the image if they can't see it.
Regarding text-based CTAs, is advisable to highlight in some subtle way the CTA so that it will stand out from the rest of the paragraph. But not too much. For example, you can make the text bold or underlined, but you should not use loud colors (light red or similar) neither bigger font sizes. The main reason is that this is something very common in non-solicited mail messages and your message will have more choices of being considered spam. Another tip to highlight your text CTA is to add a linefeed and align it to the right, so that it will be clearly visible.
Summing up: try to use several locations for your CTA. Don't rely on images as the only way to go to your landing page, and use subtle ways to highlight your text-based CTAs.
Previous posts in this series: