They are the tools that turn traffic into conversions and leads into sales; they are one of the more critical elements of any effective marketing plan. With the right CTA strategy, your website can truly make the most of every opportunity.
However, it is easy to forget how important CTAs are, let alone keep up with the changing CTA creation strategy. Many become so entrenched in one specific way of doing things that they can miss out on further opportunities with a marketing technique that is always evolving.
For instance, some companies find a design, wording and placement strategy that they like, and they will pre-package this same idea to every website and customer even though their customers may have different needs and pain points.
On the other hand, some marketers and small business owners can go overboard with CTAs and take them too far, even to the point of driving away business—who likes being bombarded with flashy CTAs after every paragraph?
It is only in finding this delicate balance between too much and not enough can marketers effectively use CTAs to drive their target audience to buy their products or services. That said, read on to learn how you can boost your CTA creation strategy.
CTA 101
To truly understand what your company needs for its CTA design strategy, you must begin with the basics.
In a nutshell, a call to action is the final step in your advertisement, blog post, email or landing page. It is the culmination of your marketing strategy, and it creates the bridge between marketing and sales. Think those colorful buttons at the bottom of texts saying messages like “Buy Here” and “Click Now.”
CTAs are the actionable element of your advertisement, letting the audience know that this is the time to act and here is how to do so. As mentioned, it is the Buy Now, More Here, Download This or Click Here button with which we are all so familiar.
Effective CTAs can be the difference between a properly flowing sales funnel that leads to a directed sale and a lost or uninterested potential customer.
They are more than just a colorful and enthusiastic pop-up. Successful CTAs are targeted, actionable alerts that provide the direct link between your marketing efforts and the actual sale. While there are countless variations on call to action design and strategy, effective CTAs will always be:
- Straightforward
- Actionable
- Value-focused
Straightforward
The language used in your CTAs can be the most critical aspect, and one key characteristic that all effective CTAs share is brevity.
A call to action should always be clear and concise, providing customers with a straightforward statement of what to do now in order to move on to the next stage of your sales process.
They should never have to read through several sentences to find the direction or the benefit, and if users spend more than a few seconds on your CTA, you have done it incorrectly.
For example, “Click Here” is short (two words) and to the point. You may want to choose this for your CTA as opposed to “Click Here Now to Go to Insert-Specific-Page.”
Actionable
While it is important to be brief and to-the-point, it must also be clear what the point is. The CTA should always be used to drive the action, and the language therein should clearly direct the customer of what to do and why to do it.
This generally includes the use of strong command verbs, including:
- Buy
- Click
- Download
- Read
- Enter
- Or any other verb that implies the desired action
In addition to what is said in your CTA, you must also pay attention to how it is said. Much of marketing is based upon creating the right emotion, and brief tools requiring immediate action — like CTAs — are where this can be most useful.
The color, language, placement and design of the CTA can help elicit the emotional response that would be conducive to buying your product or using your service.
For instance, “Buy Now” tells the reader to take action—buy said product or service. A bad CTA would be “By Buying It Now You Can Receive the Results Faster.” Again, like the above example, it’s long.
However, it also doesn’t have a simple verb that inspires the reader to take action and buy that product or service.
Value-focused
The best thing that you can do when creating and modifying your CTAs is to try to see them from the perspective of the customer.
Imagine what they would hope to gain from taking action and make the benefits of your service or product the focus of the call to action.
Will buying your product give them smoother skin? Will downloading your eBook teach them to be more persuasive? If they sign up for your email list, will they learn how to live a healthier life?
Consumers are always looking for value, and they need to clearly understand what is in it for them. They must understand the benefits of your product and immediately be able to see how it will fill a need, solve a problem and/or give them a better life.
CTAs like “Buy Now” and “Download eBook” should be next to text that not only explains what the eBook is about but how it would help readers’ pain points.
Final Thoughts
There will be many factors involved in successful CTA strategy, and these may vary according to your industry, target market, specific product/service and countless other elements. But the characteristics listed above are aspects that all effective CTAs will share, and they are the fundamental building blocks of any proper CTA strategy.
If your calls to action are straightforward, actionable and value-focused, you can immediately increase the number of clicks on your site without losing traffic.
