Strategic call-to-actions, also known as CTAs, are one of the most valuable aspects of any digital marketing effort. These words or lines of texts are directly responsible for motivating your visitors on your website to take action, such as joining a webinar, contacting you for more information, submitting forms, subscribing to your newsletter, or following you on social media.
Generally, you’d strategically incorporate your CTAs within the content of your web pages, ad messages, sales scripts, or blog posts. And without them, your website visitors won’t know what they should do next. Therefore, CTAs are important to improving your website performance, because they eliminate confusion for your visitors, and help guide their actions based on your needs.
They also help grow your audience, increase your sales, and conversion rates, and your click-through rates. In this article, you will learn about the importance of using CTAs on your website, what makes an effective CTA, and how to succeed in making one.
Why Should You Use Calls-to-Action On Your Website
In order to understand the importance of using calls-to-action, let’s take a look at what they can do for your website, and why incorporating them into your content marketing strategies is the best way for you to go:
- Improve your conversion rates, leads, and sales
- Increase click-through rates
- Encourage your sales funnel
- Eliminate confusion
- Simplify the buying process for your customers
- Make your content more meaningful to your audience
- Increase website traffic
- Expand your target audience
According to recent reports, more than 90% of website visitors who read your headline are more likely to read your CTAs as well, and adding them to your social media pages can increase click-through rates by 285%. What’s more, email messages with just one CTA can reportedly increase clicks by 371%, and sales by a whopping 1617%.
What Makes An Effective Call-to-Action?
Fear of missing out, also known as FOMO, is a form of marketing, and psychological trigger that leverages a customer’s desire to grab every opportunity presented to them
As mentioned above, a good call-to-action can make a significant impact on the performance of your website. It can be the determining factor between a lead and a conversion, and ignoring it, can be a serious mistake on your part.
When it comes to crafting a clear and effective CTA, it should be creative, compelling, and convincing. You might need to integrate the element of urgency into your phrases, and make them short, actionable, simpler, and straight to the point.
In addition to these, you might also need to highlight the reason or benefit of why your visitors and readers should take the desired action. Let’s take a closer look at how to create the perfect CTA for your website.
10 Tips to Make Compelling Calls-to-Action for Your Website
Here are ten tips to make your calls-to-action more compelling and effective for your website:
Start With Actionable Words
The first step you want to take to make a good and compelling call-to-action is to use strong command verbs, or actionable words. It’s all about being concise and straight-forward with your phrases, and not making it confusing for your audience.
For example, one of the most common and simple examples of this is the “click here” text we often see placed on many websites. If you’re in the e-commerce business, you can start your CTAs with “order,” “buy,” or “shop.” If you want your audience to download something from your website, you can start with “download.”
Or perhaps you want them to join your email lists, you can start with “join” or “subscribe.” After this, you can add a few simple words to your command verbs, and give your readers the benefit of what they’re getting.
Let Your Audience Know Why They Should Take Action
In addition to being clear and concise, you want your calls-to-action to not only tell your audience what to do, but also why they should take the desired action. This aspect is closely related to your unique selling proposition, or value proposition.
Simply put, your unique selling proposition is what makes your business different from the rest in your target market. An effective proposition can help you attract and retain customers, and also increase your clicks, and conversions.
One of the most common examples we often see is “Contact us today for free quotes.” Here, the phrase not only mentioned the action, but also gave the reason or benefit as to why visitors should act. According to previous reports, incorporating value propositions into your CTAs could increase conversions by 201%.
Create A Sense of Urgency
The next step you want to take to create the perfect call-to-action for your website is to create a sense of urgency, or fear of missing out, within your CTA. This tactic is one of the most effective ways to compel your website visitors into taking action.
Fear of missing out, also known as FOMO, is a form of marketing, and psychological trigger that leverages a customer’s desire to grab every opportunity presented to them. One good example of this is including a timer below the CTA of “Avail of Discount Now!”
Here, if your visitors think they’ll miss out by running out of time, they’re more likely to make a purchase. Creating a sense of urgency is perfect for marketing your products, and increasing your sales.
Build Curiosity
Besides the sense of urgency, you might want to try to evoke curiosity in the minds of your website visitors instead. Stirring the interest of your audience, and tickling their sense of curiosity is a powerful method to encourage them to go, and find out what comes next on the other side of your calls-to-action.
Building curiosity can increase your sales, and click-through rates. To evoke curiosity, you can ask your visitors questions, or keep them on a hook by sharing an interesting fact or information.
To do this, for example, you can create quizzes around your products or services, and help your readers find what they’re searching for. But when it comes to sharing facts, on the other hand, you can give your readers incomplete information, so as to keep them interested and engaged.
Personalize Your Calls-to-Action
Another way to create the perfect call-to-action is to personalize it and make it smarter. According to a report, personalized CTAs can outperform basic ones by 202%. The reason for this is that you’re creating content that can reflect the current interest, and level of knowledge of your audience.
Compared to a basic CTA, a smart CTA is catered to each individual. You can customize a CTA to reflect the location of the individual, the language they use, or based on whether they’re your existing customers, or leads. Creating custom CTAs can help you set yourself apart from the rest of your competitors, and drive your audience’s attention to a landing page.
One of the best ways to create personalized CTAs is to use software tools, like HubSpot.
Make Your Calls-to-Action Consistent
When it comes to making engaging call-to-actions, one of the most important things you should keep in mind is to keep your voice and messages consistent. To do this, your CTAs must always reflect the message of the content that came before it.
For example, if you place a CTA at the end of your blog content about the subject of improving search engine rankings, and you want your readers to download your free guide, you should make your CTA more descriptive, by using “Improve your SEO with this free guide!,” instead of “Download Our Free Guide.”
Use Pricing Info When Necessary
Consumers are known to be more likely responsive when they see prices, promotions, or discounts, included in your calls-to-action, or next to them. Therefore, if you’re into e-commerce, then you might want to try experimenting with your product pricing information, and incorporate them into your CTA phrases, or next to them on your product pages. This makes the buying process easier for your audience to navigate.
Use Proper Call-to-Action Button Size And Shape
If you’re running an e-commerce website, one of the best things you can do to instantly attract the attention of your visitors is to use the right size and shape for your call-to-action buttons. Your CTA buttons should be large enough for your audience to see them, and easier for them to click.
When it comes to the design, it is one of the first four most basic elements of a successful CTA, in addition to your CTA message, and its placement within your content.
Place Your Call-to-Actions Strategically Within Your Content
Where you place your call-to-actions will depend entirely on the types of CTAs and content you’ll use for your website. The most common types of CTAs are web page buttons, opt-in campaign buttons, anchor texts within blog posts, texts in social media posts, and marketing emails.
If you’re going to use CTAs for your web pages, then you can place them at the top of each of your page, or if they’re for your blog post, you can either put them at the end of your content, or somewhere in the middle of the post, if your blog is long.
Moreover, you can even insert a CTA in your sidebar, in your welcome pop-up message, or within your email marketing content.
Use Calls-to-Action to Offer Solutions
Finally, the last thing you want to do to create the perfect call-to-action for your website is to make use of those that offer solutions for specific problems. This tactic is one of the most commonly used in sales where you state the problem that your target audience is more likely to encounter, and then explain how you are the solution.
To make this kind of CTAs, you need to take several questions into consideration, and answer them. For instance, you need to ask and answer what problem do your products or services solve, and how can you show that your solution can solve the issue.
A good example of a CTA of this sort is “Want more email subscribers? You won’t get them without the proper call-to-actions.”
Why You Should Test Your Call-to-Actions
Now that you know the benefits of using call-to-actions in your website, and how to create effective and engaging phrases that can convert, the last step you want to take on this path is to test how well your CTAs are performing, which is the final basic element of any successful CTA.
By testing your CTAs, you can measure your clicks, and learn how effective your messaging is. A/B testing, which is a user experience research method, can help you do this. It can allow you to create variations of landing pages, and compare two different versions of your CTA, so you can check which one is performing better.
If you’re using CTA buttons, you can also test their colours, sizes, and shapes. According to the results of one button colour test, a red CTA button performed better than a green one by 21% based on 2,000 page visits.
In other words, if changing a minor element of your CTA button can cause your website to get more clicks, then you might want to know what other elements might affect your traffic, and conversions. You might find something interesting in your data by using A/B testing.
One of the most popular marketing tools you can use to test your CTAs is HubSpot.
Final Words:
There you have it. Incorporating call-to-action words and phrases within the content of your website can boost its performance, help your target audience avoid confusion when they’re navigating your site, direct them where you want them to go, and increase your click-through rates.
