The most important part of any text marketing resource is the final section: the call to action.
From direct mail marketing all the way to the online world, the most effective sales pages and promotional emails are designed with a clear call to action, whether it is calling for people to buy their product, donate to their cause, or even simply visit their website.
Success as an email marketer is dependent on a lot of things. The call to action is both psychology and mathematics; marketers need to understand basic psychology and emotional actions to implement it, and then require mathematical analysis abilities to hone and test it.
These three elements create any call to action, and they have been reduced down to their most important parts to help you create one.
From attention to action, structuring your call to action well is essential for delivering optimal results.
The narrative: developing interest and engaging in conversations
The first part of any call to action is the story. By delivering a story, you turn recipients into long-term relationships or customers, all by building a story that captures their attention, and keeps them interested.
Furthermore, stories are key in word of mouth marketing. When the story is share-worthy or valuable it will spread and get your recipients talking about and to you.
The decision: benefits and effective writing
After developing a story, you need to progress from narrative to active decision. Introduce a benefit into your story, and ensure it is something that the recipients can relate to.
Let them know that it solves a problem, that it is easily available, that it is valuable to them, whatever the type of content or story.
If your decision-making writing is effective enough, you can easily convince recipients to read on, look at what is available, and take the steps you would like them to take.
Taking action: conversion; after the click
Your recipients know what they want, know why they want it, and want to know how to get it from you.
The goal of the action section is to guide your recipients through the conversion process, and inspire them to do what your email wants to achieve: increasing customer retention, cross- and up-selling, capturing relevant data, creating word of mouth, whatever.
After your ‘decision’ text has done the persuasion and “selling” for you, it’s a matter or providing what you promised and what you hope to achieve after the click…
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