How many CTAs should an email have?

If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice.

— René Descartes (French polymath)

Last week I shared my thoughts on clickbait subject lines in answer to one of the questions I was asked when running a workshop on email marketing for charities.

Following on from that, there were so many great questions that I wanted to do another one justice today — it’s all about CTAs, or calls to action.

"One CTA per email" is one of the most misunderstood “rules” in email marketing. Your monthly newsletter likely has to highlight many things, so what can you do to increase the chance of someone actually engaging with it?

Why one CTA is considered a best practice

I tend to find that when you’re about to knowingly break a rule, it tends to help when you understand the motivation behind that rule in the first place.

It’s considered best practice to put one CTA in most emails because the brutal reaity is:

A reader will do at most one thing. If you don't decide which one, they'll usually choose for you. And that choice is usually nothing.

Somewhere along the lines, it’s easy to think "one CTA" means “one link”, but that’s not the case at all — plenty of excellent emails contain dozens of links.

When you present three asks (or CTAs) of equal weight, it might seem like you’ve given the reader three chances to act.

But what you’ve actually done is hand them a decision they didn't want to faff with, at 8:40am, while they’re in a queue.

And any psychologist will tell you the response to an unwanted decision is often deferral. “I’ll come back to this later”. Spoler alert: they won't.

I was never one for maths at school, but if you enjoy that sort of thing you could think of it in terms of probability…

Three equally-weighted asks are not three chances. They're one chance, divided.

So the task for us here is not to delete two links, necessarily. We need to rank our three links in terms of importance — and then make sure the structure and layout of our email honours that ranking.

A quick way to rank links: is it an ask, a read, or a reference?

I don’t know about you, but often the monthly newsletter can be a melting pot of stuff to send out — new articles, a survey, a new offering, a mention of something that the team did, and an odd link to something that adds further context for those interested.

Many of the items in your newsletter are not the same species, even though they usually get treated identically.

One way to help prioritise your links and CTAs is sort them into different buckets or tiers. As an example, you could think of prioritising based on the following:

Tier 1: the ask

The one thing you actually want the recipient to do this month, that has a deadline or a target or a number attached.

This is what you should prioritise, perhaps with visual emphasis by using a clear and bold button.

It gets space above the fold (early in the email). It gets its own paragraph explaining why it matters and what happens when they click.

Preferably exactly one item lives here. If you have two items here, it’s worth considering if you should have two emails.

Tier 2: the read

Content you'd love people to enjoy but aren't explicitly measuring — for a charity this could be a story from a volunteer, or the photos from the summer fair. This can get a headline and visuals, but the link could be a stabdard text link rather than a button to keep the emphasis on tier 1.

Tier 3: the reference

You often want to link to things people should be able to find, but you don’t necessarily need them do anything or take action.

For example, you might have updated a policy, there might be a change to your contact details, and we often link back to sources for attributing artwork. Don’t shy away from these links — they are crucial for credibility. Just place them and style them so they’re relative to everything else — often towards the end of the email, and perhaps in a smaller font.

By thinking about the goals of your different links, your email can still contain everything. But it will have a structure and a priority that reduces the effort of the reader.

Design is ranking made visible

As the person creating an email, you become the person who will spend more time reading and looking at it than any recipient.

It’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking that most recipients will spend more than seconds reading your email. Most often, the recipient is not reading, they are scanning your email.

So the visual weight of each element is crucial to form an easy-to-read map they can use to navigate your content.

Once you have your hierarchy of links defined, you need to make sure your email’s design aligns with it.

For example:

• If everything's a button, nothing is tempting to click. A button is a signal that says “this is important, click me!” If you use a button for every link you lose the main benefit of using a button: that it stands out.
• Two buttons creates a choice. And we know hoices get deferred. If you must show two buttons, try to make one the “primary” button and the other the “secondary” button.
• You can repeat your CTA Placing a link once in the text near the top of your email, and once as the button later on is OK. It’s still one ask, repeated. Repetition is a well-established approach for encouraging readers to take action, especially when many recipients never reach the end of the email.
• Focus on the order Whatever comes first is what most recipients will think the email is about, no matter your intentions. If the survey is the priority, the survey should not be the fifth item!

Is your current email template making this hard? If every section is identically styled with an identically styled button then it might be worth an hour of your time to make a few changes. It’s easy to fall into a trap where your template is forcing you down a path that doesn’t serve your content or your priorities.

What to do when one email isn't enough

Sometimes you've got two (or more!) priorities and one email. What do you do (aside from panic)?

A few approaches that I have tried and seen other marketers experiment with:

Give the highest priority CTA its own email

A short, single-purpose email three days after the newsletter will beat a third link in a busy newsletter every time. And there's a bonus: because it's short and about one thing, it's the kind of email people forward to a colleague. <!-- JAMES: link "forward to a colleague" to the 28 Aug forwarding issue once it's live on the blog -->

Defer one of your CTAs to the next email

Your newsletter is a series, not a one-off. So if it’s a monthly newsletter, you have twelve slots and twelve chances to lead with something. The pressure to cram everything into your September edition comes from treating each issue as your only shot, but often items can wait. Keep a running list and let items wait their turn when it makes sense.

Split your list — send each CTA to a different segment

If the survey is most appropriate for active volunteers and your story post is really aimed at engaging lapsed subscribers, you might have an opportunuty for segmentation. Two shorter emails could be easier to write and more effective than one large that's trying to serve everyone.

Eliminate the CTA from your email entirely

Not everything needs to be in the newsletter. Sometimes things live on the website and get referenced elsewhere. The instinct to put every internal update in the email can turn a newsletter into an internal noticeboard that no one outside the office finds interesting!

A note on measuring your CTAs

If you want to know whether any of this is working, look at which links got the most clicks (as opposed to just the overall click-through-rate (CTR).

A newsletter with clicks spread thinly across five links looks the same on a high-level dashboard as an email where those five links all went to your most important action.

Better still, measure the ultimate success of your campaign — not just the opens and clicks. If your CTA is to a survey, measure the thing you actually wanted: survey responses, not survey clicks.

Try it on your next email campaign

Open your next newsletter draft and if you feel you have too many asks and conflicting priorities, write them out. Then try to put them in priority order.

Then ask yourself two questions:

1. Does the email's layout match that order? If your top priority ask is the third section down in the same grey box as everything else, the design likely needs a few changes.
2. If you had to delete two asks, which would you keep? Whatever you'd keep can be given the primary button. The other two don’t have to be cut, but they can be demoted.

If you genuinely can't pick, that's useful information too. It could mean this should be broken into two emails, or split to two audiences. And it’s better to figure that out before you've sent it!

Ironically for an email about CTAs I don’t have one for you this week. I just hope this has been a helpful topic for you, and if it has, please reply and let me know!

Until next time,

James