Has the way of the call to action really gone the way of the great snuffleupagus?

I had a meeting today to review design comprehensives for an online magazine. During said meeting, the client sponsor said that Marketing Sherpa has done a study that stated by using the words “click here” in one of their newsletters, they raised the click-through rate by over 20%.

Our newsletter, which really, if you haven’t read by now you are just missing sooooo much, is very much predicated on the new-age philosophy of removing any “click here” language. I don’t say it’s right, it’s just how we do it. And, also, I realize that my first statement revolves around a newsletter and the click here method surfaces in any user interaction experience these days.

We’ve tried running some very basic A/B tests during client engagements before, and I have to say, we’ve met minimal or no impact between incorporating the links into well-written text versus actually separating out the call to action and instructing the reader to “click here”.

I could turn to my left and right on most days in most any public place and get varying responses, but I’d love to know why this type of language still works. Not in the sense that I don’t understand the usability of it, it’s rather a question of when will we mature to the point where it is as unnecessary as telling someone else their name in an introduction “You are Jane. I am Keith.”

It’s quite possible that if we don’t start using some sort of standards in our copywriting we’ll just keep repeating the same dilemma and the same expensive usability studies to tell us something we can’t exhaust any further.