Buttons provide a great way for your subscribers to interact with your email content. When you want your subscribers to take action, nothing stands out better than a Call to Action Button.
In this article:
When to use CTA buttons
Call to Action (CTA) Buttons are most effective when placed at points in your email where you’d like your subscribers to click and take further action.
For example, if you send an email to tell your subscribers about a new product you’ve just added to your online store, a button is a way to get them to view the item on your store.
CTA buttons in the Visual Builder
With just a few clicks, the Visual Builder makes it easy to insert buttons into your Drip emails.
To insert a button with the Visual Builder:
- Hover over the column in the email where you’d like to place a button, then click the + icon.
- When the pop-up appears, select Button.
- The button should now appear in the email.
Once you've created a new button, a few other settings will appear to the left of the email. Use those settings to customize your button.
Customizing your buttons
It's important for your email design to also fit your company's brand or a certain product you're pushing. Experiment with the different settings so you can keep your buttons consistent with the look and feel of your company and products.
If you do not currently see button settings on your screen (like in the screenshot below), click on the button you added to your email to launch the settings.
Link
When a subscriber clicks on your CTA button, that action should send them to supplemental information that is within the same scope as the content they just consumed in the email. For example, if you're showcasing a new product you've just added to your online store, the button should direct whoever clicks it, over to a product description page for that item.
To set your button link:
- In the Link field, click "Choose a link".
- When the link pop-up appears, enter the URL of the web page to where the button click should send the subscriber. Enter the URL into the Web Address field, located in the Link pop-up. Buttons accept all link types in Drip, including Regular, Trigger, and Expiring links.
- Click the Insert button to set the button link.
The URL should now show in the Link field.
Color
When deciding what color your button should be, consider using one of the primary colors associated with your brand to enhance brand recognition with your subscribers.
Change the background color of a button:
- Click on the Color setting to pull up the color picker.
- Drag your cursor around the color pallet until you find a color you like. Or, enter the hexagonal color code of a specific color.
Note: Web color standards are based on a six-digit, three-byte hexadecimal number (hex code) used in computing to represent color. Hex codes are used rather than a color's literal name to ensure the color renders properly onscreen across all web browsers and devices.
Alignment
Use this setting to align the button position inside the email column. Choose left, center, or right alignment.
The alignment of your button may not seem very important at first, but any deviation from the design pattern of the rest of your email can throw your subscribers off. For example, if a CTA button is placed directly underneath a block of center aligned text, the button will look best if it is also center aligned.
Take a look at the following product descriptions for the same item.
From the two examples above, the product description on the right fails to maintain a consistent design pattern. As a result, it does not as effectively guide the reader to the main actionable content as the product description on the left does.
Width
With your cursor, drag the slider horizontally to increase or decrease the width of a button.
Vertical Spacing
With your cursor, drag the slider horizontally to increase or decrease the amount of space above and below a button.
CTA buttons in the Text Editor
If you prefer to design your emails with the Text Editor, you can add a bit of flair with a CTA button. Because they’re quite colorful, buttons really stand out inside of the minimalistic design of plain text emails.
NOTE: Although buttons can easily be added into plain text emails, styling them will require you to use an email template other than Drip's Simple template. If you still need to create a new email template, you can learn how to do that here. Once you've created a new email template you can complete the steps below.
To insert a button in an email with the Text Editor:
- From the email editor, use your cursor to highlight the text you’d like to turn into a button.
- With the text highlighted, click the button icon in the toolbar.
- A pop-up will appear. In the pop-up, enter the URL of the web page where the button click should direct the subscriber. Enter the URL into the Web Address field.
Button styles
As mentioned before, you’ll need to modify some CSS code in order to customize the appearance and positioning of your button when using a custom email template for plain text emails. To do so, you must access the code of your custom email template.
Warning: Modifications made to the CSS of your custom template will affect all emails currently using the same template.
To access the code of your custom email template:
- In your Drip account, navigate to Settings
> Templates.
- From the drop-down, select the custom template for which you’d like to modify button styles (remember, you'll only see your custom templates in the drop-down).
- After the template loads, click the HTML tab.
While viewing the template under the HTML tab, scroll through the code and locate the following block of CSS code:
.cta-button{
display: inline-block;
padding: 12px 18px;
margin: 12px 0;
background: #F2AB27;
color: #fff !important;
border-radius: 3px;
border: 1px solid #F2AB27;
border-bottom: 1px solid #e4931b;
text-shadow: 0px 0px 2px #e4931b;
cursor: pointer;
transition: .3s background ease;
text-decoration: none !important;
font-weight: bold;
font-size: 1em;
}
The code above is what makes the button look the way it does. Notice how the block of code is represented by a particular CSS selector:
.cta-button
The selector will be located on line 194 (if you haven’t made any prior changes to your code).
You'll be working within that selector's properties to change the look and positioning of buttons styled by the template you're currently working in.
Change button background color
To change the background color of your buttons, locate the background-color CSS property found in the same block of CSS code.
The background color is set by a hexadecimal color code. You must replace the current hexadecimal code you see in your template, for the code of the color you’d like to change the button to.
Only use hexadecimal color codes when changing the background color, and be sure to include the pound symbol directly in front of the hex code, otherwise, the CSS is likely to fail.
Do not use proper names of colors in your CSS code as it can cause issues with certain browsers. For example, the following CSS property may cause issues in terms of cross-browser compatibility and goes against current web standards:
background-color: red;
Align buttons to center of email
To align a button to the center of an email, you must include 4 additional lines of CSS code:
- Copy the following 4 lines of CSS code.
margin:0 auto;
display:block;
width: 40%;
text-align: center; - Then, paste those lines of code to the very bottom of the
.cta-buttonCSS selector.
- Your code should now include the additional 4 lines of CSS:
How can I revert my button styles back to the defaults?
To revert your buttons styles back to their defaults, replace the entire .cta-button CSS selector and its properties with the following code block.
.cta-button{
display: inline-block;
padding: 12px 18px;
margin: 12px 0;
background: #F2AB27;
color: #fff !important;
border-radius: 3px;
border: 1px solid #F2AB27;
border-bottom: 1px solid #e4931b;
text-shadow: 0px 0px 2px #e4931b;
cursor: pointer;
transition: .3s background ease;
text-decoration: none !important;
font-weight: bold;
font-size: 1em;
}