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Marketing vocabulary · Campaigns & Planning

Call to action

Meaning in marketing, with examples

/ˌkɔːl tə ˈækʃn/nounCore term

In marketing, call to action means: A short instruction in an ad, email or web page that tells people what to do next, such as “Buy now”, “Sign up” or “Call us today”.

In Turkish: harekete geçirici mesaj, eylem çağrısı, CTA

How it is used

Usually shortened to CTA and said letter by letter. Copywriters and designers talk about a clear, strong or weak call to action, and about the CTA button on a web page.

Example sentences

  1. The poster looks great, but there's no call to action. What do we want people to do?

  2. We tested two calls to action, and “Get my free sample” worked better than “Learn more”.

Common collocations

  • clear call to action
  • strong call to action
  • CTA button
  • add a call to action
  • copyThe written words in an ad, website, brochure, email or package, especially words written to persuade people to act.
  • conversion rateThe percentage of people who take a wanted action, such as buying, signing up or calling, out of all the people who had the chance to do it.
  • A/B testAn experiment that shows two versions of an ad, email or web page to similar groups of people to find out which one performs better.
  • campaignA planned series of marketing activities, such as ads, posts and events, that share one goal and one message over a set period of time.

This word in other fields

The same English word can have a different meaning in another field:

More terms: Campaigns & Planning

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