The Daily Carnage

Successful paywalls incorporate good design, transparent pricing, functionality, and, above all, something irresistibly valuable behind them.

Consider these 8 tips to designing paywalls:

1. Have realistic expectations. In exchange for payment from a loyal community of visitors who love your content, traffic and social sharing will necessarily decrease.
2. Your paywall screen should be representative of what you have to offer, allowing a sneak peek into the experience. Use simple, descriptive language, pricing graphics, and decisive imagery or illustrations.
3. Explain the value and features that a subscriber or a one-time buyer will get. If you do a good job explaining the value of a premium option, users are more likely to go all in.
4. Be transparent about the terms of pricing, renewals, free trials, pay-as-you-go, and lifetime subscriptions.
5. Opt for a big call-to-action button.
6. Incorporate social proof in the form of pay-with-a-tweet or testimonials and reviews on the landing page.
7. Reiterate the value proposition with language that creates a sense of urgency, special pricing, scarcity, or social incentives.
8. For users who don’t transcend the paywall, have a backup landing page with more information about terms or benefits, FAQ, screenshots, or even an additional offer.

Read more at Design Shack.

Email CTAs have the tough task of motivating users who didn’t search for you (and aren’t necessarily ready to buy) to take a desired action. Here are 6 tips to write more clickable copy:

1. Make them want more. To persuade a casual reader into action, tell them what will happen when they click and why they should. To drive users to a whitepaper, for example, consider “streamline your operations” instead of “download” or “learn more.”
2. Use multiple CTAs. There’s no rule against using multiple CTAs in one email. Use an action-directed CTA and a benefit-focused CTA in the same message.
3. Surround your CTA with supporting statements. Your copy could ask a question, and your CTA could answer it.
4. Break the rules. CTAs are supposed to complete the sentence “I want…,” and traditionally they include a verb. But no copywriting rules are absolute. Experiment to find what works best and feels most natural with your audience.
5. Be careful what you ask for. Email subscribers at the top of the purchase funnel may be put off by “buy now” or another big CTA. Opt for anticipatory language like “discover” to invite action and offer a benefit.
6. Talk to a person, not an audience. Your CTA should feel like an invitation from one individual to another, not a command from an institution to an audience. If you handed someone a book, you’d say “Check it out,” not “learn more.”

Click on over to MarTech for more examples for gold-standard CTA examples.