They only take up a little bit of physical space, but call to action buttons take on outsized importance in your digital marketing and website efforts. Learn how you can optimise them to drive conversions and marketing success.
Getting through to your audience is a complicated task. You can’t rely on the fact that they’ll become a lead or buy something from your website on their own accord. Instead, you have to prompt them to do the right thing, from the first time they hear about you all the way to the final purchase.
Enter calls to action. These little message points have become a core piece of any successful digital marketing initiative, but are still most prominent on your website.
Most marketers know them as buttons on a website. In reality, they’re so much more. They’re the elements that drive directly to the conversion, from headline to the description that reinforces the action prompt. The button we’ll discuss below makes sense only in the larger context that surrounds it and helps to persuade your audience.
In this guide, you’ll learn not just the basics of calls to action (or CTAs, as we’ll refer to them throughout) but also some best practices that help you drive conversions at every level of the sales funnel.
First, an important clarification: in talking about CTAs, we’re not talking about any language that drives your audience to action. Instead, we’re talking about a specific piece of the marketing puzzle, the buttons that outline specific next steps your audience should take.
Done right, these call to action buttons can drive your marketing success and increase your conversions for a number of reasons:
They’re now a part of almost every website. That means simply including call to action buttons is no longer enough. You also have to make sure that they meet and exceed audience expectations, helping you reach your business and marketing goals in the process.
Don’t think of it as a small tool that only works for a limited number of industries. Instead, consider CTAs as vital to the success of almost any kind of websites. You’ll find these buttons in spaces like:
Stated differently: calls to action are applicable almost everywhere. Anytime you want your audience to take that next steps, they’re a valuable tool in driving them through the buyer’s journey and towards the conversion. That is, of course, as long as you build your CTAs the right way.
Because of their ubiquitous usability, you can find CTA buttons in almost every shape and size. That can make finding those who succeed in increasing conversions difficult to spot. These 8 tips help you get there, creating better calls to action that ultimately help you grow both your lead database and your customer base.
First things first: calls to action thrive on the type of language you use to persuade your audience to take that click. A simple ‘submit’ isn’t enough. Instead, follow these best practices:
Next to the text, the colour of your button might just be the most important component in making sure it’s successful. Too often, great CTAs fail to get conversions because they don’t stand out enough from the rest of the website. It has to be clearly visible, ready to attract attention from the first glance.
At the same time, it’s important to stay away from using just any colour. As is the case with your language, it needs to be consistent with the rest of the website (and your brand colours in general) to avoid attracting negative attention.
That means walking a tight line: contrast to its background is absolute key, but that contrast has to happen within the right colour scheme. When in doubt, talk to your web designer or marketing partner about just what that might mean for the visual look and feel of your buttons.
Allow us to combine two best practices into one here. As with anything else in marketing, size matters when it comes to your calls to action. A button that’s too small will not get the attention of your audience. Too big, and you risk taking over the entire screen on mobile devices.
Generally speaking, it’s good to stay on that larger side of things. That allows you to introduce some more benefit-oriented language, while also enabling you to take some graphic design liberty. A download button could be a great add to any CTA that leads to that download.
Similar to size, the shape of your button can make a major impact. You’ll most frequently see squares and so-called ‘bullet’ shapes, but you don’t have to stick to that template. Consider adding some drop shadow or maybe even experimenting with a round button. Psychology studies have found that people are naturally drawn to curves, so even curving your edges may make an impact and improve conversions. It can all help to attract attention.
Where you place your calls to action will make a major difference in both visibility and conversions. Where exactly the best placement on your website is depends in large part on the type of action you want your audience to take:
Remember that your audience reads your website in a Z-shaped pattern, which should inform your placement.
In addition, you may want to consider placing multiple CTAs with the same offer/step throughout your page to maximise their effectiveness. To get to conversions, you have to keep asking for the sale. In order to avoid getting stale, consider adding a variety of CTAs with the same goal on the same page that offer a slightly different message, adjusted to the context immediately surrounding them. Together, they begin to tell a story that drives more convincingly to the conversion.
Placement, colour, and size can all help you grab your audience’s attention. But if it’s crowded by other content, you won’t have much success in convincing your audience to click and take that action. Instead, you need to consider (and build) negative space.
Remember that the average user now pays attention to your website for only eight seconds before deciding whether they want to take the next step. That’s not a lot of time to convince them, but helping them spot that next step is crucial.
Negative space can help you get there. Leave significant empty space around your CTA button on each side. The same images, graphics, and copy are just as effective further away from the button. Give it room to breathe, and your conversions will increase in the process.
Your audience uses the internet very differently depending on what device they’re on at a given time. Desktop computers, laptops, and tablets are more apt for in-depth research on a specific topic. Mobile devices, on the other hand, are more commonly used for spur-of-the-moment browsing with shorter attention spans.
You can’t quite change the entire content of your site based on the device, but you can tailor the calls to action based on the type of user you expect to take action. For instance, about half of all web traffic is mobile, but most PDF download requests will probably come from desktop devices. Online shopping, meanwhile, is increasingly shifting towards the mobile realm.
Take a look at your website analytics. Determine whether specific pages are predominantly visited by desktop or mobile users. Try to understand why. Then, build your calls to action in a way that accommodates the favoured device type of the page(s) in question.
As mentioned in the introduction to this post, calls to action can work across the entire sales funnel and buyer journey. That doesn’t mean, of course, you can (or should) plaster your entire website with buttons for every possible funnel stage. Instead, similar to the device type mentioned above, tailor your button to the buyer’s journey stage to which it applies.
A few examples can get you started in that thought process:
Of course, these are just a few examples. The key here is playing the matching game; when the CTA matches the most likely user intent, you’re in the right spot.
Finally, calls to action are the perfect example of being able to improve an aspect of your website over time. Never assume that your first try at a CTA button is perfect. Instead, continue to tweak and improve it over time based on how your audience responds to it.
The best way to do that is through split testing, also known as A/B testing. It’s a simple proposition. You run two almost identical buttons on your website that differ only in one key area. If one outperforms the other, it becomes the new standard, and you can test another variation.
Through this process, you can test and improve every feature of your CTA buttons:
Depending on the platform you use, you can even automate the process, showing the two versions randomly to two segments of your audience at the same time and moving onto the winner as soon as critical mass is reached. The result is more data-based decision making that ultimately results in more conversions.
Call to action buttons may be small in size compared to the totality of your web pages, but they’re vital to your conversion success. Built the right way, they can drive audiences through the entire sales funnel and grow your customer base.
Building them right, of course, is absolutely crucial. Don’t make the mistake of using the wrong language, colour, placement, or timing. Instead, consider each aspect to make sure they all work together to drive conversions.
You don’t have to take those steps alone. If you are struggling with conversions on your website, or are unsure on the types of call to action to implement, call us on 020 3355 8747 or send us an email and let’s talk.
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