How have HubSpot Calls to Action (CTAs) changed, and how can you use them?

Welcome to your masterclass on “Calls to Action (CTA)”. In this blog, we’ll discuss how CTAs have changed since their first feature launch and how you can integrate them into your marketing strategies. 

What Is A Call-to-Action?

CTAs are a tool in the HubSpot Marketing Hub designed to guide prospects toward a specific outcome or destination, such as subscribing to a newsletter or downloading content. You may be asking yourself, but why, why would I use a CTA instead of just dropping a link on a button into my email or landing page? Here’s the long list of reasons:

• CTAs enabled advanced tracking and attribution. You can see views, clicks, and influenced contacts, which plain links don’t allow.

• You can compare CTA performance across different marketing properties (emails, landing pages, etc.)

• CTAs have A/B testing abilities to optimize the color or message that your prospects respond to best.

• Level up personalized messages based on smart rules to provide the most appropriate CTA message based on visitor.

• If you edit a CTA in the CTA editor the live CTA will update everywhere it appears saving your team valuable time.

• You can go beyond inline buttons and create pop-up forms (these now live in CTAs not forms, more on that later), and slide-in options for high-converting website calls to action.

But First, a Note on Legacy HubSpot CTAs

HubSpot’s Legacy CTA 2.0 feature was unveiled in June 2023 and has added major utility to the tool. If you hadn’t used CTAs in the past because they were cumbersome…you’re not alone. We were not big fans either (but you should definitely explore them now). These were some of the shortcomings of legacy CTAs

• Static design: Limited customization (buttons only, basic color/font choices).

• IFrame embed: CTAs were embedded using iframes, which made styling and analytics trickier.

• Hosted in Design Manager: CTAs were managed separately and required more setup within HubSpot templates or modules.

• Limited testing: A/B testing was only available on some plans and often required workarounds.

• Limited flexibility: Could not dynamically update or personalize easily.

• Conversion tracking only on click: Tracked clicks but not nuanced interactions.

• Lacked responsive design: Not always fully mobile-friendly depending on the embed context.

What they used to look like:

But, good news, the CTA feature improvement solves all of these problems, and some that we didn’t even know we had. What they look like today:

What’s New in CTAs 2.0

CTAs now include several tools: buttons, image buttons, and pop-ups. Historically pop-ups were in the forms tool but they’ve moved and there are ton of great templates to use that were not included in the old tool. Other improvements include:

• Drag-and-drop editor: Uses a no-code design experience similar to landing pages and emails.

• Smart content support: Can dynamically change the CTA based on user list membership or lifecycle stage. This is a BIG DEAL. Think buttons that you include in standard bottom-of-email boilerplate that can be adjusted based on lifecycle stage that you can maintain from a single location. Game changer.

• Embedded using native HTML: No iframe—faster loading and more consistent styling with the page.

• Full A/B testing built-in: Easy multivariate testing with visual reports.

• Global styles: Centralized branding controls for consistent CTA appearance across assets.

• Deeper analytics: Tracks views, clicks, influenced contacts, and downstream metrics.

• Multiformat CTAs: Now supports banners, pop-ups, slide-ins—not just buttons.

Getting Started with CTAs

So now that you’re sold that CTAs offer value, how should we use them? Here are a few use cases and best practices to get you started

Where to use them

• Landing pages
  CTAs can direct users to book a demo, download a white paper, or browse case studies. This can offer valuable information about what your prospects are most interested in. You can also use smart rules on the CTAs to serve up different CTAs for customers vs. prospects, or new vs. returning users. While you cannot use CTAs in paid advertising campaigns such as social ads, you can customized the destination landing page with CTAs to improve conversions.

• Emails
  CTAs are a great tool to use in standard bottom-of-email boilerplate to serve the right CTA to each viewer based on lifecycle stage.

• Blogs
  Include CTAs in your blogs to drive readers to the next stage of their buying journey. Make a single CTA that is customized with smart rules based on lifecycle stage and use it on every single blog. Need to make updates? No problem. Update the CTA in HubSpot and it will push the changes across every blog. That’s right, no need to go into all 143 blog posts on your site to push an impactful change.

• Website
  Use CTAs to improve the personalization of your website experience. You can use buttons for CTAs like request a demo, pop-ups and slide-ins to improve subscriber conversion, and image CTAs to drive conversions.

Best practices

• For all calls to action, whether you are using the CTA tool or just a regular button you’ll want to place the CTA before the scroll, at the end of the content piece, and in high impact places within the content.

• Just like with email, A/B test copy, color, placmenent, and size.
  Pro Tip: High-contrast colors are an easy way to grab the attention of prospects. Try mixing and matching brand colors to fit the color scheme of your webpage to make it pop!

• Make the most out of Smart CTAs to personalize the message based on job title, lifecycle stage, or list membership (MQLs, customers, corporate vs. private organizations, etc.)

• Thoroughly test your CTAs on both desktop and mobile.

• It’s more important to be clear and explicit with your CTA than it is to be too creative. If the user doesn’t know what you want them to do…they’ll likely do nothing.

• Make sure the CTA isn’t deceptive, if you say they’re getting a case study and they get kicked to a demo page your bounce rate will likely increase.

• While the urge to set it and forget it may be strong, resist! Monitor the performance of your CTAs and iterate to optimize performance.

The easiest way to improve pipeline health is to improve conversion rates at each step of the funnel. These tips can help you optimize your traffic conversions keeping that funnel full without burdening your marketing team.

Ready to Kick Your Conversions into High Gear?

Red Brick Partners is a HubSpot agency partner and we’re equipped with the team to help you optimize your current HubSpot implementation or get started with your first HubSpot account. Contact us for a brainstorming session or to spec out your project.