What is a Call to Action?

A call to action is a marketing message that encourages users to perform a specific action. From the marketers point of view, this action is a conversion. It might be:

• buying a product
• signing up to a service, a newsletter, or a community
• clicking a link to get to another content piece

From a linguistic point of view, most CTAs are short imperatives. So they command the recipient to do something. Typical examples are:

• buy now
• download now
• get it
• sign up
• join now
• start now
• learn more

CTAs can appear in different forms:

• a button on a website or a banner ad
• a link in an ad banner
• a phrase in a text that is visually highlighted
• captions in screenshots or videos