Beefree blog

What's the Best CTA Button Color for Emails?

Beefree team
Beefree team
Dec 22, 2020
What's the Best CTA Button Color for Emails?
What's the Best CTA Button Color for Emails?

Originally published on December 21, 2020. Last updated September 10, 2021.Your email’s call to action is the driving force behind your entire campaign. You want readers to take a step forward in their buyer journey— whether you’re asking them to register for an event, make a purchase or read more of your content.Color is one of the most significant elements in making your CTA button noticeable. But which color converts best? Let’s take a closer look at how brands choose the best button colors for their emails and landing pages.

Your email's call to action is the driving force behind your entire campaign.

What is a call to action?

A call to action or CTA is a specific direction for your reader. Readers skim emails and landing pages, so having an obvious place to click gets them to the next step of their journey faster. CTA buttons are powerful marketing tools. In fact, Healthtech company Carelogger found that just changing their CTA button color increased conversions by 34%.

How color affects choices and feelings

Color impacts how we interpret information. When you’re deciding on a color scheme for your email or landing page, it’s important to consider the connotations of that color.While color interpretation is highly dependent upon personal experiences, certain generalizations can be made about the psychology of color. The Color Emotion Guide from the Logo Company is often cited as a general guide:

Color Emotion Guide Logo Company

People also tend to judge a color based on how appropriate they feel it is for a particular brand. In other words, your customers gauge whether a color fits your brand personality. This means there’s no single “right” color to choose. It’s a matter of what color evokes the energy and personality of your brand.

Best practices for your call to action colors

In order to convert, your call to action buttons needs to stand out from the rest of your design. While there is no perfect color that will lead to higher conversion rates, running A/B tests on different colors is an easy way to optimize your designs. Here are a few approaches to try out:

Use Your Brand Color

Brands often choose CTA button colors that match their logo color to establish design cohesion in email. When a color repeats itself throughout an email, especially at the top and bottom, it gives the whole message a balanced and unified appearance. This is an easy way to reinforce and boost brand awareness.Here’s what a matching scheme looks like in action with HelloFresh. Check out the lime-colored logo and coordinating CTA button.Subject line: Get $90 off! Avoid the crowds, get dinner delivered.

best cta button color for email

It’s also easy to spot these pale pink CTA buttons that perfectly align with all of Billie’s brand colors.Subject line: Need a gift?

best cta color

Keep your CTA colors consistent

Subscribers will associate specific colors with actionable items. For instance, hyperlinks are often blue, which let’s readers know they can expect a clickable link in emails when they see a word or phrase in blue. This will go for your CTA color choice as well. Once you assign a color to your call to action buttons, subscribers will quickly learn to recognize that color for your CTAs in all your emails. Don’t confuse your readers by having too many colors for your CTAs. Assign one color for your primary CTA and one color for your secondary CTAs. This consistency will keep subscribers on your same page, always guiding them towards your intentional action items.

Prioritize your main CTA

Focus on choosing the best color for your primary CTA and then begin to think about placement and text hierarchy. Your primary CTA color and placement will purposefully guide your subscribers through your emails. Allison Valenzuela, BEE Freelance Graphic Designer, explains:“With color, you can help guide an audience's eye and how they take in information. Play with color after nailing down the hierarchy of your content and see what makes the most sense for the impression that you want to leave with your audience.”Consider how to keep your primary CTA top of mind when thinking about where to place it in your email. Make its size larger than the rest of your text in a bold shade of color.

Make your CTA pop

An eye-catching call to action will lead to higher conversion rates which means using a button color that blends in with the rest of your email content isn’t your best move when trying to attract subscribers.Allison explains that you should, “Look for a color pairing that allows the button to have a high contrast to the background. An example of high contrast would be a red or an indigo button on a white background.”It’s also important to consider the “isolation effect,” which is basically the idea that something looks more or less attractive depending on what it’s surrounded by. When it comes to color, some research has shown that people have a preference for one strong, bold color that reigns above the rest of the text.Another way to make sure your CTA stands out is by using different CTA colors while sticking to your brand kit. For instance, Instacart updates its CTA button color from email to email, using one green button and one orange button shown below. Both green and orange are Instacart brand colors, but the company makes colors pop more by switching things up within their brand color palette to match the most appropriate color for each message.

instacart cta button examples

Changing your CTA button color from one email to another is effective when you have a well-established style guide and visual identity. Even when you change color schemes from email to email, your emails still reflect the look of your brand.

Test your CTAs

One color is not always better than another, an effective CTA color will vary based on text-hierarchy, brand style and a variety of other key factors. So be sure to set your call to action colors after you’ve tested them multiple times on your subscribers.Implement subscriber surveys to gain feedback on your CTA color and then run A/B tests until you find what leads to the highest conversion rates. Cycle through this process until you’ve solidified what your bulletproof button color should be.

Create a CTA in BEE Pro that converts

Find the best functioning CTA color for your brand’s emails and landing pages, and then start creating in BEE Pro. With BEE, your CTA buttons will always be bulletproof, which means there is absolutely no coding required on your end. Customize your CTA buttons or explore how designers implemented CTAs in our template catalog. Give your CTAs a boost with a pop of color and start designing now.

Share this post with your friends! Pin it on Pinterest ?

colored cta

Related posts

Send Error-Free Emails with Confidence Using Beefree

Learn about the Beefree features that can help you and your team catch mistakes, streamline collaboration, and send with confidence every time.
Beefree team
Apr 15, 2025

Using Beefree with Marketo Engage 101

Learn how integrating Beefree with Marketo Engage can help you build high-converting, on-brand email campaigns— faster.
Luca Penati
Apr 4, 2025

What Are Email Security Gateways? A Guide to Secure Communications

Are your newsletters being marked as spam? Discover all you need to know about email security gateways and how to create emails that pass all the checks.
Beefree team
Mar 12, 2025

Send Error-Free Emails with Confidence Using Beefree

Learn about the Beefree features that can help you and your team catch mistakes, streamline collaboration, and send with confidence every time.
Beefree team
Beefree team
15 Apr
2025

We’ve all been there: You craft the perfect email, hit “send”, and just as you settle into the satisfaction of a job well done, someone slacks you: “Hey, something doesn’t look right with that campaign.” 

If this sounds familiar, you should know that you’re not alone: According to the 2025 Really Good Email Survey “90% of email marketers say they have a history of noticing mistakes in their emails after they’ve hit the send button.

This becomes especially common when your team constantly juggles multiple campaigns or makes edits until the last minute. Sadly, even the smallest mistakes don’t just slip through the cracks; they cost you.

Luckily for us all, mistakes can be avoided. And no, not by lighting a Pre-Send Protection Candles™ and hoping for the best. But rather by equipping your team with the right tools that work with your team – not slow them down. Let’s talk about it!

Building your team’s safety net for mistake-free emails with Beefree 

When everyone involved in the email creation process is aligned and supported by smart systems, executing mistake-free emails becomes second nature. Instead of scrambling to do damage control, you’ll want to set up the tools and processes that help your team focus on what they do best: creating emails that connect, convert, and confidently represent the brand.

In this article, we’ll discuss how you can use Beefree to: 

  • Reduce human errors 
  • Implement systems of checks and balances 
  • Establish guardrails & frameworks for on-brand email design

1. Catch mistakes before they happen with Smart Check

Missing links that lead nowhere? Forgotten subject lines? HTML emails that get clipped in Gmail? It’s easy to make little mistakes that derail your campaign’s performance. 

Learn more about Smart Check → 

Beefree’s Smart Check automatically checks your designs and alerts you of any red flags so you can fix them before they cost you opens, clicks, or conversions. Think of Smart Check as your built-in QA partner who will catch:

  • Missing links
  • Heavy images that could slow down email load times
  • Missing subjects & preheaders that impact engagement
  • Missing alt text on images that hurt your email’s accessibility
  • Large HTML files that might affect deliverability (or get clipped in Gmail)

2. Keep every email on-brand with built-in guardrails 

Most of us don’t nail the perfect campaign on the first try. Great emails are a team effort. However, when multiple teams are involved in the email creation process, branding can quickly go off the rails. 

A misused font, clashing colors, or buttons that are too small to click don’t just make emails look disjointed—they can damage your brand’s credibility.

With Beefree’s Advanced Style Kit, you can set clear, predefined guidelines for fonts, colors, spacing, and more—so every design starts on the right foot. Once configured, all new emails automatically inherit your brand styles, reducing the need for constant oversight and minimizing errors.

Advanced user permissions let you lock down specific design elements, giving you full control over what can (and can’t) be edited. That means anyone on your team—regardless of design expertise—can confidently create emails that look and feel like your brand.

3. Empower your team to create with confidence with reusable content

When your team isn’t bogged down by the cumbersome process of creating content from scratch (or fear of going off-brand), they can move faster—and with far more confidence.

With Saved and Synced Rows, you can provide your team with pre-approved content blocks—like headers, footers, and other commonly used design elements—that they can use in their designs without creating them from scratch. That ensures design consistency, eliminates redundant work, and makes email creation a lot faster.

Learn more about Saved Rows → 

4. Ensure your team is aligned with centralized reviews and approvals:

Creating the perfect email often takes a team of designers, copywriters, marketers, and other team members working together. But when multiple people are involved, endless back-and-forth and feedback scattered across multiple conversations and channels can slow things down, lead to miscommunication, and ultimately cause mistakes. 

With Beefree’s built-in commenting, your team can collaborate and share feedback where the work is actually happening—right inside the builder. And if you’d like to involve external reviewers into the review process, you can do that as well. 

Learn more about commenting → 

Plus, with Beefree’s built-in Approval flow, you can ensure your designs are reviewed and approved by the right stakeholders. Stay aligned with real-time notifications on design changes, lock edits on approved content, and get a clear view of project status for smoother team collaboration and high-quality results.

Learn more about Approvals →

5. Need an additional pair of eyes? Use the power of AI to support your team

Take some weight off your team's shoulders and use AI to support them in the final stretch. Whether it’s catching typos, flagging inconsistencies, or suggesting optimization, AI can be a saving grace when deadlines are creeping in.

For those times when you can’t remember the difference between “there, their, and they’re,  Beefree’s  AI Writing Assistant is there to help. This eager-to-learn helper can  review your copy for grammatical errors, tone of voice, and even share suggestions for making it just a bit more compelling. Our AI Writing Assistant can also seamlessly translate content or automatically generate ALT text for images to enhance the accessibility of your emails. 

Learn more about AI-powered content creation in Beefree →

The tangible cost of email mistakes

Mistakes don’t just impact performance; they slowly erode credibility. What starts as a small oversight can be a massive inconvenience for your readers, sending them straight to the unsubscribe button. As for your team, mistakes chip away at their confidence. Instead of brainstorming for the next campaign, they’re scrambling trying to figure out how to do damage control.   

When done right, email is a powerful tool for connecting with your audience. But a single mistake can unravel that connection and undermine trust.

  • A missing or broken links can interrupt your subscribers’ journey to conversion, negatively impacting campaign performance.
  • A missing subject lines means your emails won't stand out in the inbox, hurting your open rate
  • An awkward typo might signal a lack of attention to detail
  • An off-brand design can make your brand look disorganized
  • An email that gets clipped in Gmail because it’s too big means some subscribers might never see the full email content.

Design error-free emails and send with confidence with Beefree 

Beefree helps teams of all sizes create polished, on-brand emails—without the risk of costly errors. With built-in safeguards, streamlined approval flows, and collaboration tools that keep everyone aligned, Beefree acts as your team’s system of checks and balances. From first draft to final sign-off, you’ll have everything you need to send with confidence, build trust, and get results.

Try Beefree's Business for free for 15 days and get access to all of Beefree’s tools that help you catch mistakes, streamline collaboration, and send with confidence every time. Or schedule a call with one of our experts to discover everything Beefree can support your team.

Using Beefree with Marketo Engage 101

Learn how integrating Beefree with Marketo Engage can help you build high-converting, on-brand email campaigns— faster.
Luca Penati
Luca Penati
4 Apr
2025

Marketo Engage is a powerful tool for marketing automation, but when it comes to email design flexibility, many users find its built-in editor limiting. Creating visually compelling, mobile-responsive emails often requires custom coding or workarounds, slowing down workflow and making it harder to execute high-quality campaigns efficiently.

That is where Beefree comes in. By integrating Beefree’s no-code, drag-and-drop email design platform with Marketo Engage’s advanced automation capabilities, teams can build professional, responsive emails without coding headaches and push them directly to Marketo in just a few clicks.

This article explores:

  • The challenges of designing emails directly in Marketo
  • How Beefree solves these pain points
  • A step-by-step guide to integrating Beefree with Marketo Engage
  • Common FAQs and troubleshooting tips

The challenges of designing emails directly in Marketo

Marketo’s built-in email editor is useful for basic templates but presents several limitations for marketers and designers.

  • Limited design flexibility – Customizing layouts, fonts, or interactive elements can be difficult without custom HTML or Marketo’s proprietary syntax.
  • Technical barriers – Advanced customizations often require HTML knowledge or an understanding of Marketo’s email template language, which may not be ideal for non-technical teams.
  • Time-consuming manual processes – Without a centralized style kit, teams may struggle to stay on-brand and often have to manually recreate headers, footers, and other reusable content blocks for each email, adding extra steps and slowing down production.

Due to these challenges, many marketing teams turn to external email builders like Beefree, FeedOtter, or Knak to improve design efficiency and automation.

(source)

Why Beefree is the best email builder for Marketo Engage

While other external email builders like Knak and FeedOtter also integrate with Marketo, Beefree offers distinct advantages.

  • No-code drag-and-drop builder – Enables teams to design professional emails without writing any code.
  • Advanced design features – Provides more customization options beyond what Marketo’s built-in editor allows.
  • Mobile-responsive templates – Ensures emails adjust automatically for both desktop and mobile devices.
  • One-click export to Marketo – Simplifies the process of moving email designs directly into Marketo Engage.
  • Ability to update existing templates – Allows quick updates without requiring manual re-imports of HTML files.
  • Team collaboration – Enables teams to work together in real time, with built-in guardrails and approval controls to ensure error-free emails before exporting.

By integrating Beefree with Marketo, marketing teams eliminate design frustrations and manual email imports, allowing them to focus on high-performing email campaigns.

Learn more about Beefree's integration with Marketo Enagage [https://support.beefree.io/hc/en-us/articles/24837761625618-Export-Emails-to-Marketo]

(source)

How to update existing email templates in Marketo

Instead of manually editing HTML, Beefree allows users to edit emails in Beefree and update existing ones in Marketo Engage with one click.

  1. Open the email design in Beefree.
  2. Make changes and click “Export.”
  3. Select “Update Existing” to overwrite the previous version in Marketo Engage.

This feature ensures that emails and templates remain up to date without requiring complex HTML edits or duplicates.

(source)

Frequently asked questions on using Beefree with Marketo Engage

Can I use Beefree with other ESPs besides Marketo Engage?

Yes! You can connect Beefree to any ESP, MAP, or CRM including Mailchimp, HubSpot, Salesforce Marketing Cloud, and others. To learn more about how to integrate Beefree to your sending platform watch the video below: 

For a full list of our native integrations visit [https://beefree.io/integrations].

Are there any limitations when exporting Beefree emails to Marketo?

Yes, there are a few important limitations to be aware of:

  • Charset emojis are not supported in Marketo. Including emojis in your email content may result in an error. To prevent this, Beefree automatically replaces unsupported emojis with a placeholder. For more details, refer to the [Marketo documentation on emoji support].

Preheader text is not a native field in Marketo. However, Beefree includes it by embedding the preheader directly in the email's HTML code during export.

Additional resources and links

Why you should use Beefree with Marketo Engage

By integrating Beefree with Marketo Engage, marketing teams gain a faster, more flexible way to build high-converting, on-brand email campaigns—while leveraging Marketo’s powerful automation and analytics to track performance and optimize results.

  • Design responsive, professional emails with ease.
  • Maintain brand consistency across every message.
  • Collaborate efficiently and gain insights to improve campaign performance.

Ready to elevate your Marketo email marketing? Try Beefree today and streamline your entire email creation process.

Start your 15-day free Business trial today!

(source)

Stay informed on all email trends

From the latest creative design strategies that inspire your next campaign to industry best practices and tech advancements, our newsletter is the go-to for all things creation.

Thank you! Your submission has been received!
Oops! Something went wrong while submitting the form.
By clicking Subscribe you're agreeing with our Privacy Policy
Beelo here 👋 Got questions?
1