Top 10 - CTA Best Practices
Are you looking for ways to convince more people to do business with you?
Would you like your website and email calls to action to convince more people to take action and lead them down your conversion path?
We send company emails almost every day and social media posts. Do you include what’s called a CTA or call to action? What action do you want the audience to take after reading your email or the social media post? You can have the best graphic, the best video, the best text, and the best everything, but in the end, if the customer does not take the intended action and is lost in the mix. The purpose of the content goes down to 0 and becomes invaluable.
In this blog, I will share Call to action CTA best practices to strengthen CTAs in your marketing messages & website.
What is a Call to action CTA
Call to action CTA is the action designed by the site owner intended for user or visitor to take.
Short and Simple CTA
The first one might seem like a no-brainer, but a lot of people don’t understand this and that is to keep it short and straightforward. CTAs that are too long and wordy is ineffective and increase bounce rate. You should keep your CTA text short and sweet and stick to the point.
Keep your CTAs to no longer than four words, if possible, you can make the most out of this limited word count by using strong verbs. Some examples of short generic CTAs that work well include, Get started, Learn more, Join free, and Buy now.
Create Urgency
The best calls to action create a sense of urgency. Creating a feeling of urgency or scarcity is a well-known and effective tip for boosting conversions. There are a few different ways that you can do this such as using time-related language, shop now, start now, sign up today, using words like limited reserve your spot, last chance, and the sale ends tomorrow. You can also use a countdown timer for offers that are expiring and that creates a sense of urgency as they see the seconds ticking down the idea is to create a sense of urgency FOMO (fear of missing out) prompts users to complete the action or risk losing whatever you are offering.
Personalize your CTAs
Personalizing your CTAs can boost your conversion rate by over 200 percent. This doesn’t mean that you should put click here “first name” everywhere but it pays to use the data you have available subtly adjusting the wording of your CTA depending on user location whether they’re an existing customer or new lead and other relevant factors.
Reverse Psychlogy
The idea is to offer the user two choices rather than a simple yes or no. Use the power of reverse psychology to push the user towards the action that results in a conversion.
Utilize Contrasting Colors
Let’s talk a little about design uh the best calls to utilize contrasting colors in white space to be effective you need to make sure your CTA stands out against everything else on the page. Using contrasting colors is the easiest way to do this. If your CTA is the same color as the rest of your text, it will blend into the background. Using plenty of white space around your CTA also helps it to stand out more. Size matters, make your CTA text bigger than the surrounding text.
User Responsive Design
At least half of your users are likely browsing your content on a mobile device so our next tip is to use the responsive design before you publish to make sure that you’ve checked the placement and appearance of your CTAs on a variety of screen sizes and software agents an ideal position for your CTA is high on the page in the middle column. This is where most people’s eyes go when they visit a landing page.
Mobile CTA location above fold
A couple of years back when I was working at iBaby as Senior Digital Marketing Manager, I run a couple of A/B tests to determine the optimal location for the Mobile homepage CTA & email CTA. The final data gathered concluded a higher conversion rate by 25-30% if place the CTA is above the fold on mobile. Similar to the image see below. As soon as the user lands the website on Mobile, have the option to both see and click on the CTA. Avoid making the user have to scroll down to find the CTA. The majority of the emails we sent were from eCommerce. As soon as the email or the homepage appeared on Mobile, it included CTA prominently visible. “Order Now”. Both sales and analytics data concluded CTA above the fold on mobile helping engagement and driving sales.
Create a Button your main CTAs
Another design element that you can use to make your call to action stronger is to make it into a button. There are many ways you can design your CTAs with a plain hyperlink, text graphics, or photographs, but buttons convert the best by far. the call to action is so important so essential and so overwhelmingly powerful that you should not attempt to make anything but a button, this is because the human brain is wired to expect action when a button is pressed. Buttons are also quite tempting we want to press them.
Double check landing pages & CTA URLs
I can’t stress this enough before you send out anything double check your landing pages. If there’s any doubt in your mind triple check everything. There’s no point in having a super effective CTA if the user clicks it and it goes to a broken page. After you finish building your web page or email make sure you click through all your CTAs and check that the links are all going to the right page and that all forms are working properly.
Test and Refine
Finally, don’t take my word for it, test and refine, it’s unlikely that you’ll be able to create a perfectly optimized CTA right off the bat instead this is an ongoing process and you should be testing and improving your CTAs continuously as you learn more about what is most effective for your particular audience. A/B testing is a traditional way to do this. Split your audience in half and show them two different versions of your CTA, the version that converts the best, wins don’t change multiple elements at once but compare variables such as color placement and copy individually.
CTA's examples - Personal brand website- Drive actions
