The secret of Goldilocks calls to action
👉 you know...ones that feel...just right
I said last time that you don’t always need a direct call to action in every email.
Sometimes your main goal is to build credibility and trust so your readers are more likely to take action in future.
Sometimes it’s simply to send a great email so they’re more likely to open and read your future emails.
But very often you will want them to take an action. Usually to offer something for sale or to take a step towards a sale like booking a call with you.
And even if your main goal is to build credibility and trust or to make it more likely they open future emails - a specific call to action very rarely clashes with those goals. If you do it right, it’s complementary.
But frankly, I do see a lot of rather ham-fisted calls to action. Ones that are more likely to put people off than get them to buy or do whatever else you’d like.
So how do you get a Goldilocks call to action that’s just right? That people notice and take action on, without being so jarring or aggressive it pushes them away.
Experience tells me it comes down to two things:
Firstly, the call to action must follow naturally from the content of your email. An obvious bad example would be pitching a course on Facebook Advertising at the end of an email where you share tips on Linkedin.
Instead you want your reader to reach the end of your email, hit your call to action and think “yeah, that makes sense…let me click”. What you’re offering them must be in the same area as what you’ve just been talking about and it needs to be a logical next step.Secondly, the call to action must offer something that’s additive to what you’ve already shared. That builds on it rather than undermines it.
I see way too many emails that break this rule. That share tips and ideas but then imply or outright state that you won’t be able to get any results unless you buy the product. Or that just don’t give enough useful information in the pseudo-tips that you could ever do anything with them.
How do you think that makes the reader feel? Cheated. Led down a garden path. Like the tips and ideas they just invested time in reading and thinking about are now worthless.
Instead the tips must stand on their own two feet. They must be valuable in their own right. The product can help you get results faster, easier, cheaper, with less trial and error, with less pain and personal involvement. It can let you scale the results. Or it could give you alternatives - more ideas, more different ways of doing things. It could do it for you or automate it.
In other words there are a ton of ways your paid product or other next step can help your readers get more than they got just from the tips and ideas in your emails. But the vital thing is the “more” bit.
Give value and offer more.
Some people will be happy with what they’ve got already. No problem - they’ll be more likely to buy in future as a result.
But some people will be ready for more. It’s those people you’re targeting with your call to action.
Here’s a simple (and real) example of that in action:
You can take the two criteria I’ve shared in this email and use them as a guide to create your own effective calls to action for any email you send.
Or if you want more in-depth step-by-step guidance with examples and 5 specific high-performing templates for sales calls to action you can “copy paste”:
The “Personal Support” template
The “More of this” template
The “Tools and templates” template
The “In depth guide” template, and
The “Struggling for time” template
You’ll get them all (plus a bonus “Super Signature” template) in my Effective and Engaging Email Newsletters course. Along with my complete guide to having an endless supply of brilliant ideas, quickly writing engaging and persuasive emails and automating and scaling up your email marketing.
- Ian
Next time: the first of a series of emails on possibly the more important skill in writing emails (or any marketing).