Design Tricks for Creating More Clickable Email CTA Buttons

If you’re a regular reader of FilterGrade, you already know how email marketing can save your photography business. It allows you to build relationships with clients, promote your work, and communicate your visual art to a broader audience.

And among the tips on how you can use email marketing effectively, there always comes the one that sounds like, “Engage them with a call to action.” Indeed, a call to action (CTA) is a must-have, powerful weapon for promoting your product or services to clients.

The only question:

How do you engage them with a call to action so they would click?

This article reveals the tricks you, a visual artist, can use for designing compelling email CTA buttons. Let’s see if there’s something beyond a text that makes a person click and accept your offer. Cover photo via Jose Antonio Gallego Vázquez.

5 Tips for Designing an Email CTA That Converts

Marketers know (and numerous statistics confirm it) that personalized and targeted emails influence purchases. And while an informative text of emails matters for engaging the audience, a CTA motivates them to take your desired action and choose your service among others.

For those new to all this email marketing stuff:

An email CTA is a button or a linked text explaining to users what they should do after reading your message. The purpose is to encourage them to click and thus get engaged with your brand.

“Click here,” “Sign up,” “Learn more,” “Submit,” “Download,” or “Buy now” — you’ve seen them a million times. But these mere words won’t bring any results to your business if you ignore the overall design of your marketing emails. Color, size, and even the place of your CTA in emails matter for clicks and conversion.

Here’s how to design an email call to action so it would work:

1. Make It Look Like a Button

When writing an email to clients, you have several options for designing a call to action: you can make it a link, a picture, or an HTML button. The best option would be to make it a button because it gives a 45% boost in clicks.

Why do buttons in emails work best?

First, they are more intuitive: A person sees a button and understands that it’s something they need to click to learn or get something. The same principle doesn’t work with pictures because some users disable images in emails, so they won’t see a CTA if you design it as a picture.

Second, buttons are more trustworthy: Most users still see email links as spam, so they may ignore the “Click here to learn more” words in the email text.

2. Use Contrasting Colors

Photographers and other creatives working with visuals know that different colors influence mood and perception and can evoke different emotions. It’s all about color psychology, and the same principles work for email CTA design:

Choose a button color based on the emotions you want to evoke in users and the actions you hope to inspire. If you have a particular brand palette you use across different marketing channels, consider it for email button design too: 

Clients already associate your photo business with particular colors, so the CTA of the same color will help them recognize your message and evoke trust. More than that, it’s critical to emphasize visual contrast: Regardless of its color, your button should stand out from the rest of your email for a user to see where to click.

Photo by Steve Johnson.

According to experts, the best colors for email CTA buttons are orange and green. Both evoke friendliness and peace, positive associations and trust, and are bright enough to stand out in the email body.

Some also suggest a red color for buttons because it’s about excitement and desire, but others say red is too aggressive. Everything depends on the context.

3. Make It Big Enough and Locate Properly

The size of your email CTA button also matters: It needs to be eye-catching but not distracting. The trick here is to find a sweet spot between big and small.

Your CTA shouldn’t be aggressively prominent but touch-friendly. It shouldn’t distract a user from the message, but it needs to be big and bright enough to identify on both desktop and mobile devices. As already mentioned, high contrast with the email background is critical.

• Make it a minimum of 44×44 pixels (Apple’s recommendation)
• Use a font size of at least 16 px for CTA buttons

Another thing to consider is the place of your CTA button within the email body.

A good practice is to place it on the right-hand side of the text: It’s a natural flow of reading for people from the Western world. However, consider placing the CTA in the upper-left corner if most of your target audience read emails on mobiles. Thus, it won’t cut out of the frame.

Also, you might want to place the button “above the fold,” so all users (even those not scrolling to the email bottom) could notice it. And don’t hesitate to repeat it again “below the fold” if applicable, after the explanation text convincing the readers to click.

4. Add White Space

To reduce friction around the email CTA button and visually separate it from other elements, please remember to add white space around it. It creates a visual focus for users, making the button stand out.

Enough white space around CTA buttons in email bodies helps avoid visual noise. It prevents buttons from looking like clutter, no matter how big or bright they are.

It’s that very moment when a minimalist design calls the shots. While it may look plain for some, it works.

Photo by Solen Feyissa.

5. Make It Interactive

Try shading for users to see the button lives on a different plane or make it change colors when a mouse is on it. These little tricks enhance interactivity and boost click-ability.

Here goes another trick:

Design your email picture to add some directional cues to the CTA button. It can be an arrow pointing to the button, thus drawing readers’ attention to it. Or, you can place a picture of a person who doesn’t look at the camera but in the direction of your CTA button: Humans can’t ignore eye gaze (that’s psychology, again!), subconsciously reacting to a photo with people in it.

YouTubers know this trick works: When designing thumbnails for videos, they use photos where they point a finger or look at a particular element for users to pay attention to it.

Make Your Email CTA Buttons More Clickable

Now that you know the common principles of designing clickable email CTA buttons, it’s high time to use this knowledge during your next marketing campaign. For professional photographers, vloggers, and other content creators, it’s critical to stay in touch with the audience and turn followers into clients.

Every detail can make the difference: Color, size, location, and other design elements you use for email buttons demonstrate your professionalism and communicate your marketing message to the world.

Author bio:

Lesley Vos is a seasoned web writer in love with visuals and their influence on human brains. She blogs at Bid4Papers at the moment and contributes articles for publications on business, marketing, and self-growth. Welcome to her Twitter @LesleyVos!