As with landing pages, the call to action in an email is an extremely important element for determinig the success of your email campaign.

When thinking about the CTA for an email the bst approach can be summarised with the acronym CRAFT:

Consistent

The most important factor when it comes to the call to action is ensuring that what you're asking the customer to do is consistent with the subject line, the body of the email and the ultimate goal. This should hopefully be taken care of as you develop your email plan and the content for your campaigns as discussed in Section 2 and the first part of Section 3 above.

Relevant

Actionable

An actionable call to action is one that has a direct result: something that makes their life easier. Often the best way to do this is to play with the format of your email. Amazon provides a simple example to show what we mean.

Rather than using a button that says "Rate this book" and getting the customer to click-through and do the rating on-site (which would be perfectly valid), Amazon have upped the ante and made the call to action more actionable using a series of links that link directly to rating the book. By removing a step and making the links deeper this approach is a great example of how formatting can make your calls to action more actionable.

Focused

Being focused means one thing: have a single call to action! Whether you're sending a plain text email, a rich text email or something with a lot of HTML, 9 times out of 10 you'll be better of focusing on a single call to action.

This does not mean that there are no exceptions to the rule. Some sales emails or 'daily deal' style emails from retailers will work well by including links to different sales or sections of their website but, in most cases, even these emails generally have a single goal.

Having a single call to action doesn't mean you have to hide it. Be loud and proud and make it obvious. Repeat it if you can: either at the top and bottom of the email or as part of the footer, signature or postscript (the P.S.). Here's a great example from a webinar invitation. Although the email is long-form sales text, the email repeats the call to action (using different language) toward the bottom of the email. This is very effective:

Targeted