The Best CTA Of All Time

Back when I was self-employed, before I joined Facebook in 2012, I owned a site that aggregated a big list of competitions people could win. It was pretty popular - not "change the world" levels of popularity - but thousands of people showed up every month to see what was new.

To get people to the site, I leaned on a typical mix of wayfinders. Social share buttons, SEO, and - of course - an email list (Mad Mimi, I believe, was my tool of choice back then). No paid traffic.

Getting people to sign up to that list was the most predictable way to build traffic. SEO worked well, but - back then at least - the waters were choppy (Google's Panda update wasn't very nice to me).

People read the emails, visited the site, but also shared them on social media - and by email. It created a pretty nice flywheel effect. Compound interest, and predictable. Worth investing in.

So I did some testing, and landed on a key ingredient of My Best CTA of All Time: FOMO.

"Never Miss A Competition" worked wonders for my newsletter sign up rate. People really didn't want to miss out on competitions, specially niche ones they might have a chance of winning. And, back then, we were in the midst of a pretty bad post financial crisis recession. Any joy would do.

A more generic version of this might be "Never Be Out Of The Loop." Relevant to almost any website, news source, or blog. No human ever wants to be out of the loop.