A strong Call to Action (CTA) can completely change how an email performs.

After experimenting with various CTA placements, wording, and button designs over the years to improve Click Through Rates (CTRs), I’ve learned that the CTA is often far more important than the content itself. 

You can write an article that is super polished, thoughtful, and value-packed, but if the CTA isn’t clear, it’s unlikely to produce any tangible results. 

There are many different types of CTAs to choose from, such as benefit-focused, emotional, and curiosity-driven CTAs. In my experience, some worked brilliantly, while others tanked in performance and were quickly removed. But each test taught me something about my audience and how they behaved, what motivates them, and why certain CTA formats perform so much better.

In this article, I’ll walk you through the exact Call to Action Email Examples that have delivered the best results for me, across different types of newsletters and campaigns. 

I’ll show which CTAs worked best for growth, engagement, sharing, and conversions, and how beehiiv helped make it easy to test and track CTA performance within my campaigns.

CTAs are the conversion point of every email. They are where reader attention turns into action, and action into a tangible result. That’s why understanding CTAs is so important, as it’s the moment when someone from your audience decides to take the next step on their journey with you - or not.

A strong CTA should cut through the noise of crowded inboxes and easily show a user what they can do to interact with your business.

Even the smallest of tweaks, like changing a single word or choosing a different color for a CTA button, can dramatically shift results, showing just how important it is to get your CTA right.

In my experience helping brands with their digital marketing, I’ve found tiny changes like swapping Learn More”’ for “Get a Quote”’ significantly increased conversion rates, while moving a CTA from the bottom of an email to directly under the fold always yielded great results.

These tips aren’t just one-offs – they’re typical results of small, thoughtful adjustments that genuinely improve campaign performance.

When readers search for Email Call to Action Examples, it’s usually because they’ve noticed the power that CTAs hold, and they want to make sure they get them right for their own campaigns. 

The more intentional you are with your CTA design, placement, and content, the stronger your results will be.

The Brink, an AI-focused newsletter on beehiiv, has shown just how important CTAs are, amassing 14,000 subscribers just one month after launch. 

This case study shows proof of how, when a CTA is obvious, relevant, and placed correctly, the potential for rapid growth is enormous. Check out the full case study here.

Over the last 10 years, I’ve run more CTA tests than I can count. These experiments were simple A/B tests that compared small variations to see how subscribers responded and helped me optimize my campaigns for conversion rate.

Through testing hundreds of Call to Action Email Examples, I’ve learned that clarity, relevance, and visual simplicity consistently outperform heavy design or trying to be too clever.  

Here are some of the key lessons I’ve learned from testing email CTAs to help you get a head start with your own CTAs.

I think you should describe your own experiments with CTAs and what you discovered about clarity and design. Mention what made some CTAs perform better than others.

One of the most important discoveries for me when testing Call to Action Examples for Email is that short, clear CTAs always perform better than long-winded ones. 

I used to believe that giving readers a lot of options like ‘Read the Full Article,’ ‘Watch This Video,”’ and “Share This With a Friend”’ would create more opportunities for conversion; but, in fact, it just confused my subscribers, and they’d be more likely to click away from my email.

After a few weeks of testing, I realized that when readers have to choose between actions, they can experience cognitive overload and end up choosing neither option. 

A single CTA makes the next step obvious, removing ambiguity and focusing the reader’s attention on one simple action.

Even when writing editorial newsletters, where adding multiple resource links is super tempting, the strongest results came when I’d guide users towards one main CTA. 

Secondary links can still feature, but they shouldn’t compete with the primary action. beehiiv’s 3D Analytics helped confirm this for me, showing a higher CTR when I reduced my email CTAs from three to one. This isn’t just unique to my newsletters. It’s a pattern seen across many high-performing campaigns, with a CTA almost always being the smartest choice.

Button design is a very unrated element of CTA testing. 

In my campaigns, I’ve found that even subtle design changes like contrast, shape, spacing, and size can dramatically influence my engagement levels. Many creators focus primarily on CTA copy, but readers are more likely to notice the visibility of your button first.

The clearest insights came when I started testing contrast. High contrast buttons always outperformed low contrast ones, regardless of color. In my opinion, this is because high contrasts help readers quickly identify your CTA, even while skimming content.

I found that rounded corners performed better than sharper corners because they looked more clickable and friendlier, and plenty of white space around a button also helped it stand out.

I’ve tested many different styles of CTAs in beehiiv, and the editor makes it simple to tweak design elements like color, padding, alignment, and size. 

For me, medium-width buttons tended to outperform full-width or small buttons, helping my CTAs feel balanced on smaller devices without being too overwhelming.

It’s clear to me that frictionless design matters just as much as good copy; and, by making your CTA more visible and readable, users are far more likely to click on it.

Placement is another hugely influential factor in CTA performance.

Through my CTA testing, I’ve learned that CTAs tend to perform best in three locations:

For short, snappy emails like announcements or product launches, CTAs placed near the top always earned the best CTR results. Readers opening these emails are often scanning emails, looking for my main point, so placing a CTA above the fold tends to increase the chance they’ll see it.

Longer, editorial-style emails worked best with a mid-email CTA. Readers of these types of emails want context and need to understand the main insight or story before they take action, so naturally placing a CTA after the first paragraph works well and doesn’t feel forced.

End-of-email CTAs work when scroll depth is strong. beehiiv’s scroll-depth analytics helped me understand when subscribers were reaching the bottom of my emails -- and when they were reading to the end, bottom-placed CTAs worked really well as a final punt for conversion.

The main insight here is to place CTAs according to email type, paying close attention to where momentum is strongest within your emails.

The final lesson I want to let you in on today is that testing email CTAs isn’t just about big subscriber numbers. It’s also about setting expectations and converting the audience you already have.

Many creators believe they can only achieve success with tens of thousands of followers, but this just isn’t true. In fact, multiple beehiiv customers have shown that they can earn six figures with relatively modest list sizes because their CTAs were targeted, intentional, and aligned with reader motivation.

A great example of this is featured in beehiiv’s “Six-Figure Email Businesses Without Huge Audiences” spotlight. This shows how it’s not always about scale, but about conversion, retention, and consistently delivering value. 

When readers know exactly what the next step is, your results will compound, even with a smaller audience.

Why Listen to Me? I have been working in the digital marketing space for nearly 10 years, predominantly helping brands with their email marketing and online presence. I now specialize in creating great content for beehiiv to help people nail their email strategies!

If you’re looking for email call-to-action examples, this is the section for you. The examples below are based on real-world testing and can be easily replicated into almost any type of newsletter. 

The best CTAs are short, clear, specific, and will always match the intention of your message.

Four categories of CTAs consistently perform well across different newsletter types:

We’ll explore each of these categories in the sections below to show how each category uses different psychological triggers and aligns with a specific outcome.

Growth-oriented CTAs like “Join Now” or “Subscribe Today” always work exceptionally well in newsletters where community and exclusivity are common themes. These CTAs invite subscribers to join a shared conversation or group and tend to work well in welcome sequences, aligning pages, or referral-driven campaigns

I’ve used growth CTAs extensively in my campaigns, and I’ve experimented with adding a specific benefit like “Join Now To Access Exclusive Content.” 

Giving users extra clarity on what they’ll receive by joining tends to increase clicks, as does social proof CTAs like “Join 12,000 + Members” by tapping into herd mentality.

These CTAs work best when placed early on in an email, particularly in shorter campaigns where the main goal is rapid signup. 

In longer content, these growth-oriented CTAs are better placed after a compelling hook/value section, which establishes the importance and result of joining before the CTA appears.

Examples of growth CTAs that consistently perform:

These CTAs are direct, confident, and ideal for growing your audience or community.

Editorial newsletters focus mainly on curiosity, narrative flow, and information depth. This makes the “Read the Full Story” CTA particularly compelling for these types of campaigns, instilling a natural continuation of the email rather than a stark interruption.

When a reader opens an email expecting a key insight or compelling narrative, this CTA gives them scope for more detail and information than the email newsletter alone.

This type of CTA also performs well in newsletters where you tease part of a story and direct readers to read the full article on your website or blog. 

The promise of continuation should pique a reader’s curiosity and encourage them to further engage with your brand by clicking the CTA. 

In my A/B testing, “Read the Full Story” consistently outperformed more vague CTAs like “Learn More,” creating a better sense of narrative rather than general exploration.

Examples of editorial CTAs that also perform:

These CTAs perform best in the middle of an email, after you’ve delivered the main context that will generate interest with your audience. Their job is to convert attention to action, giving readers a compelling reason to click through to your site and indulge in their curiosity.

The “Try It Free” CTA is great for product-driven newsletters, software tools, or software as a service (SaaS) businesses.

The psychology is obvious: lowering perceived risk increases clicks. When readers believe they can explore something for free, without commitment, their resistance drops, and curiosity leads them to conversion.

Through testing, I found that CTAs like “Try It Free” or “Start Free” consistently outperformed CTAs like “Sign Up” or “Get Started” because they emphasized ease and immediacy with no commitment. 

In some tests, I found adding the phrase “No payment method required” further increased CTRs, as it reinforced the free element of the offering.

These CTAs work best when the value proposition has already been clearly outlined. If readers understand what they’re trying and why it’s useful, the CTA will feel logical and frictionless. 

In beehiiv, I’ve found that placing this type of CTA after a feature list or problem-solution section always yields positive results.

Examples of this type of CTA:

The key to the success of these CTAs is a clear alignment with reader psychology. People love exploring new tools but tend to avoid commitments, so “Try It Free” bridges this gap and makes it ideal for SaaS brands, creators selling digital products, or brands promoting a “freemium”’ offer. 

Geekout Newsletter leveraged beehiiv’s Boosts feature to earn $25,000, showing that well-placed, relevant promotional CTAs can help drive revenue as well as engagement. Check out the full case study here.

Referral-style CTAs are among the highest-performing CTAs for audience growth.

Phrases like “Share This With a Friend” tap into a natural social instinct of sharing valuable content with friends, particularly when it helps them look well-informed and helpful.

I’ve found that this type of CTA works best when positioned at the end of an editorial newsletter, once readers have consumed shareable content. 

If you consistently deliver strong insights, people genuinely want to share them, but are more likely to when given a direct, friendly CTA that enables them to do so.

Adding a simple “Share This With a Friend” CTA increased organic referrals by over 20% in some of my campaigns, especially when paired with beehiiv’s Referral Program. This system rewards subscribers for inviting others, helping to grow a subscriber list and encouraging people to share for a specific incentive.

Examples of this type of CTA:

These CTAs work really well for newsletters built around expertise, curation, storytelling, or niche insight. The more value you deliver, the more people will want to share it with friends; and, because sharing is optimal for organic growth, this CTA will become one of the more efficient methods of list expansion you can use.

The beehiiv platform offers one of the most effective setups for optimizing CTAs, making it easy to stop the guesswork and start making data-backed decisions.

When creators search for terms like “Email Call to Action Examples,” they don’t just need ideas, but they need a way to test those ideas, too, which beehiiv enables very easily.

The platform offers A/B testing to compare different CTA versions, 3D Analytics for tracking engagement, and dynamic CTAs for personalizing CTAs to different subscriber segments. This level of customization allows you to show your readers the CTA that is most relevant to them, helping improve engagement and conversion rate.

Here’s how these three beehiiv features work to make beehiiv a powerful tool for CTA creation.

A/B testing is a quick and reliable way to discover which of your CTAs is working best and which may need some work.

beehiiv makes this process super easy, allowing creators to isolate one variable at a time so that they can clearly identify what’s driving the main difference in results.

For example, you might test “Read Now” vs. “Read the Full Story” or a high-contrast CTA button with a more subtle one.

To run an effective CTA test, you need to create two versions of your email that differ only in one specific aspect. This ensures that your data is clean and easy to read.

beehiiv will automatically split your audience, send each version to a set sample of subscribers, and track performance in real-time. You’ll be able to learn which CTAs attracted more clicks and which resulted in more conversions. 

beehiiv’s analytics platform makes it easy to drill down into these details and optimize your CTAs based on real data. After the test is complete, beehiiv can then send the winning version to the rest of your audience to maximize results. 

With consistent A/B testing, you can refine your CTAs based on real behavior, instead of guesswork and assumptions.

Analytics are the engine behind effective CTA optimization.

Without analytics, it’s impossible to know whether users clicked or converted from particular CTAs or why they clicked and what happened next.

beehiiv’s 3D Analytics gives creators a clear, actionable view of the whole process, measuring the most important metrics for CTA success:

Other metrics like device breakdown, CTOR (Click-To-Open Rate), and link-level reporting can help provide further information on why specific CTAs perform under certain conditions.

beehiiv presents this data in a simple, readable way, allowing you to review the performance of your CTAs and make data-driven decisions quickly and efficiently. 

You’ll notice that patterns will start emerging, allowing you to identify what consistently works for your audience and what may need optimization.

One of my favorite methods of CTA optimization is dynamic segmentation.

Segmentation is one of the most underused tools in email marketing, and beehiiv makes it very easy to tailor CTAs to different subscriber groups. This means you don’t have to blanket send the same CTA to your whole audience. 

Instead, you can personalize messaging based on behavior, engagement, or subscriber lifecycle and dramatically increase relevance, clicks, and ultimately conversions.

For example, a brand-new subscriber who has just signed up to your email list may see a “Start Here” CTA that guides them carefully towards foundational content. Meanwhile, a long-term engaged reader may receive a CTA like “Read the Full Analysis,” which matches their existing level of interest.

Cold subscribers may respond better to a lighter CTA, such as “Catch Up on This Week’s Highlights,” so you can reach these types of readers, too.

A great tip with dynamic content is to build your CTAs around location, referral status, or purchase history. If someone has already tried your product, a “Try It Free” CTA would make no sense, but a “Refer a Friend” CTA is likely to perform well.

beehiiv’s Dynamic Content Blocks make it easy to conditionally display different CTAs in the same email, which change based on the subscriber who opens it. This personalization makes sure all readers get a CTA that is uniquely matched to them, increasing the likelihood of engagement and conversion.

All marketers make mistakes with CTAs, myself included. Early on in my journey, I sent emails with super vague CTAs, confusing layouts, and multiple competing CTA buttons.

Here’s how I identified these issues and what I did to fix them.

My first major mistake was using vague wording in my CTAs. 

Phrases like “Learn More,” “Click Here,” or “Check This Out” were bringing me few results; and, instead of sounding casual and breezy like I intended, they just didn’t communicate what a reader would get by clicking.

When I started using specific CTAs like “Read the Full Story” or “Try It Free,” my readers gained clarity, and my CTR improved straight away. 

A specific verb paints a clearer picture of the next step, which is why my vague, breezy wording went out the window, and clear CTAs came in.

Another issue of mine was weak placement. I would often bury the primary CTA at the bottom of the email, not wanting to come across as too pushy, but beehiiv’s scroll-depth analytics showed me that a large percentage of my subscribers weren’t even reaching the bottom of my emails.

Once I moved the CTA higher up, ideally below the fold or after the main value section, my CTR and conversions went up significantly.

I used to think that adding a lot of CTAs would diversify my email and give more opportunities for conversion.

In fact, it confused my readers and made my email feel cluttered and unorganized. Readers didn’t know which action to take, so they didn’t take one.

Consolidating my email into one primary CTA increased clarity and led to a much higher CTR immediately.

Sometimes, my CTA buttons would blend into the design of my email too much. While subtle, low-contrast CTAs often look more elegant from a design perspective, they just don’t perform as well as high-contrast CTAs.

Once I switched to high-contrast buttons with a clear outline or background color that stood out, my increased clicks and performance far outweighed my desire for a seamless design.

The last mistake I want to mention is misaligned CTAs. If my CTA didn’t match the tone or intent of my email, I quickly noticed that readers point-blank ignored it.

For example, an editorial-style newsletter doesn’t pair well with a hard-sell CTA like “Buy Now.” Instead, “Read the Full Story” or “See the Breakdown” feels more natural and yields better results.

Similarly, a promotional email needs a strong, benefit-driven CTA, not a vague, curiosity-inspired one.

After working in the digital marketing space for 10 years and carrying out dozens of CTA tests, I’ve learned that the best CTAs feel natural, relevant, and valuable to the reader. 

These types of CTAs are clear, direct, and perfectly aligned with the purpose of the email, regardless of whether you’re sending editorial content, a growth-focused campaign, or a newsletter advertising a new product.

Here are a few key takeaways to remember when testing your CTAs:

If you want to experiment with CTAs and start improving the CTR and conversion rates of your campaigns, start a free, 30-day trial with beehiiv. This intuitive platform offers A/B testing, growth techniques, and workflows to help you grow your brand and start using the CTAs that will produce real, measurable results.

You can write a clear email with a powerful CTA by keeping your CTA short, direct, and well-aligned with the purpose of your email.

Use a high-contrast button or bold text link so that it stands out visually and place it where readers naturally pause or expect a next step.

Some strong examples of CTAs that work well in an email include “Read the Full Story” for editorial pieces, “Try It Free” for promotional emails, and “Share With a Friend” for community-led newsletters.

These CTAs clearly communicate the action and set out the expectation of what a reader will receive after clicking.

A good example of a CTA is a phrase that clearly communicates the next step to a reader, telling them what to do next.

You could use “Join Now” or “Subscribe Today” for growth campaigns or “Get a Free Quote” for product-driven emails. 

Whichever CTA you choose, it should reduce friction by emphasizing ease and zero commitment, and it should sound warm and friendly.

A CTA in an email is an instruction that tells readers the next step they should take, such as reading an article, joining a community, or purchasing a product.

CTAs can transform passive, curious browsers into actively engaged readers, resulting in higher CTRs and conversion rates.

Common examples of CTAs: