Spectral Web Services
Have you tried the CTA card yet? You should!
Seriously, this thing is super versatile, and I love it.
I haven't heard much about Call to Action cards since they were introduced in early April. I've seen them in a few newsletters, but mostly to promote merch or subscriptions. Friends, they can do so much more than that, so don't get put off by the name.
CTA cards provide an easy grouping of content. You can (ab)use that in all the ways I discuss over in my article about product cards. You can also use the CTA card as an easy way to have some content for some user types but not others, without being limited to a single paywall line. Does the paywall line ("public preview card") still have a role to play? Oh yes, absolutely. It's hard to beat the convenience of adding one line in the post and being done. If you need to restrict access by tier (not just unregistered/free/paying), you're still going to need the paywall line, as the CTA card doesn't distinguish between paid tiers. But if you wanted to start your newsletter with some content only for paying members, now you can. Or maybe you just want to group your content a little differently than the current very single-column layout that Ghost produces.
Everything below this point is a CTA card. I'm putting a –divider– between CTA cards so that you can see where one ends and the next begins.
When I was writing this last week, I wanted to make it really clear what was callout cards and what wasn't, and I decided that using an
<hr> would be confusing, since some call to action cards also include a horizontal line. So, yes, the "--divider--" is intentional, and no, you shouldn't send out posts looking like this one does. And maybe next time, I should be clearer about what I'm doing.
(It all made total sense in my head last week.)
Er... right. Everything below THIS point is a CTA card. That's a callout card up there. 👆
–divider–
You should totally try out Ghost Pro. For reasons. (Yeah, this is a demo, and I could do better.)
–divider–
I'd love to hear what you think about these new CTA cards!
Personally, I think they're pretty spiffy. Do you? Tell me more!
–divider–
Maybe you'd like to mock up an author or illustrator card?
You could to that pretty easily!
–divider–
There's no actual requirement to use an image OR a label.
These two paragraphs are actually a content card. They blend in pretty nicely with the text around them, if that's something you'd like to be able to do. (That might be theme specific, so be sure to test it out before committing.)
–divider–
This isn't a title, but I did make it bold.
There's also this second layout, that looks a LOT like the product card, except without the title. The CTA gives you more customizability than the product card, in terms of button color (full spectrum), link color (black or accent color), background (limited pastels, grey, white, or none), so I guess I can forgive it for not having a title.
–divider–
It should also be possible to do side by side layouts of these cards, but because that requires some extra styles, it's not likely to work consistently in email.
Happy customizing!
Hey, before you go... If your finances allow you to keep this tea-drinking ghost and the freelancer behind her supplied with our hot beverage of choice, we'd both appreciate it!
