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…

I am an interactive marketing and social media journalist and blogger. I write about interactive marketing, email marketing, social media marketing and viral marketing on www.socialemailmarketing.eu, pay me a visit! I'm also a member of the global peer-to-peer social media marketing network Social Marketing Forum which you really should join!