Suggestion can be a powerful email marketing tool. When it comes to effective email marketing, subtlety just doesn’t pay off. It never behooves an online marketer to tiptoe around a point, especially if that point is to encourage visitors to your website or purchasers of your products or services. Naturally, it’s important to lay out the suggestion in a compelling manner—nobody wants to be hit with the hard sell, especially if they’ve signed up to receive your monthly newsletter out of a sincere interest in your brand. But if you don’t remind your readers of the action you’d like them to take, they’ll never take it.
This is called inserting a “call to action” in all of your marketing messages. A call to action is essentially just that—calling your readers to take a specific action. For some, it may be enough to just put it out there. But if you really want to achieve results, do the following:
- State your call to action more than once. Don’t riddle your message with too many calls, but say it twice to ensure the message is received loud and clear.
- Attach a sense of urgency. If you’re making a limited time offer, stress that fact so that your readers will understand the offer doesn’t stand forever.
- Separate your call to action by putting it in boldface text so that it stands out among the rest of the text in your marketing message.
- Use hyperlinks to help your readers get where they need to go to satisfy the call to action, but don’t overdo it. A few placements in a message is enough.