As any email marketer knows, your call to action is a crucial element of your campaign. When tweaking your text can double your conversion rates, you can’t afford to ignore it. Even a 5% increase in conversion rates can translate into huge sales if you’re talking about thousands of customers.

So why PayPal, a company who you might think would know better, would use this confusing and non-clickthrough-inspiring call to action text is beyond me.

Though the analytics of the campaign will of course be the final arbiter, I can’t imagine many people being inspired to “shop smarter now.” Not only was the email fairly unintelligible with images turned off (a big design no-no), but the call to action was so vague and un-motivating that I instantly hit “delete” when I saw the actual copy.

Thoughts such as “I already shop online,” “why would I buy anything from paypal?”, “paypal sells things now?” and “I’m at work, and don’t want to be shopping” ran immediately through my head–not the kind of things you want potential customers to be thinking.

Actually clicking on the button takes you to a really slow-loading “campaign redirect” landing page, which then takes you to another slow-loading product shopping page. No deals, no prominent explanation.

I can only hope for PayPal’s sake that they were running an A/B split, or perhaps even an A/B/C/D split, and I got the worst copy of all the offerings.