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Better Call Sale: CTA Best Practices

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Blake Davies
Better Call Sale: CTA Best Practices

Call-To-Action is something every web page should have. They are not uncommon, actually, and you can find them everywhere on the web. Social media platforms have them, so do the blog posts, but to be considered really effective they must impact the revenue. Usually, CTA will take users to the landing page where they will complete some sort of form (i.e. convert), but they can take them wherever you need.

The goal is to lead your visitors using marketing resources and techniques through your offer and show them what they can expect and experience from your brand. In another word, they will leave you their contact information so you can stay in touch. If you have a website and are trying to promote your brand, you should aim to create CTA with a high click-through rate or CTR. In order to achieve just that, here are some CTA best practices you can use for any business.

Be clear about the action and benefit relation

To create the right relation between the action and benefit, you have to use the right strategies. This means that your CTA has to abide by certain rules in order to be well worth it both to you and your visitors. When you think about how to present your CTA, consider being descriptive on its purpose. Visitors don't have the time nor will to guess or click until they find out what was your primary intention. Some even consider this as an intrusive and spamming behavior and will more likely leave and never come back.

Examples of this poor practice are “Click here”, “Continue” or “Download”, something we all had an opportunity to come by on the Internet and will most likely pass due to the lack of trust. These CTAs don’t tell you what you’ll get, but only what is expected of you to do. So instead of chasing your visitors away with demanding they take action, create a relationship with them. Simpler and proper CTAs like “Watch the Video” or “Get Your Copy Now” show that your visitors will get something in return if they perform the action.

As time goes by, you can try more complex CTAs such as “It’s finally here! Have your free issue of our magazine today” or “Fall/Winter collection is on sale this weekend only. Take advantage of our unbelievable discounts and buy some fabulous pieces at bargain prices”.

Be consistent with your message

Consistency is something that will help you gain trust from your visitors and also be less wage about the message you’re trying to convey. It is important that your visitors understand “what” and “why” they should do something, so the CTA must point to the content preceding it.

For example, you have an article “Thor: Ragnarok Sets the New Pace for MCU”, and you want your readers to download an instruction manual on how to turn into Hela for a cosplay. Instead of saying “Download a Cosplay Guide for Becoming Hela”, try to make it sound less like a sales pitch and more as a friendly suggestion. In that case, you can use for CTA something like “Try These Easy Instructions and Turn into Hela”. This is only a simple example, you can use CTA to start the discussion on the movie, to introduce more related content, or even take your visitors to associate website.

Be noticeable

The visual aspect is also another important feature of your CTA. You need to make sure that it's obvious so people would know it's there. This is easily achieved with size, contrast, and image. When it comes to size, you may think down the line "the bigger, the better", but it can actually be a bit too much. You have to take into consideration that visitors will mostly use their phones to access the website, and so adjusting the size for that purpose should be a priority. You can start with Apple recommendations for minimum size which is 44x44 pixels.

Color is usually the most advised tool to highlight something and, in case of CTA, it's the contrast of tones that will help you gain noticeability. If you have trouble deciding which color to use with respect to the theme of your website, you should check the color wheel. Another choice is to use red or orange since they proved to bring the highest conversion rate for CTA buttons. The last option for CTA is using custom-made design or images. The best practice is to present the benefits of using CTA to the visitor, and doing it through high-quality production with a web design agency.

Be in the right place at the right time

What you can easily find out through a hub for SEO resellers or anyone else competent in digital marketing is that being in the right place at the right time is another significant aspect of CTA. If it’s not in place when your visitors are ready to use it, then you’ve failed to implement it correctly. CTA location depends on its purpose and should serve the relevance of the offer and your credibility. When developing CTA, take into account what your visitor is doing.

For example, if you’re creating it for a buyer, then take into account if they would react to the offer at that time. Potential buyers are always the tricky ones since they expect to get their money’s worth and that makes them suspicious regarding the offers popping-up on the websites. So might want to rethink the location and be more tactful to avoid turning your CTA into spam.

Be creative

Don’t think that CTA doesn’t require creative work. You need to design the look, plan the color scheme and draft the content, and all those elements are part of the creative process. But no matter how creative you are, you will have to prepare several versions and test them in order to find the right one. You can use marketing software like Optimizely or HubSpot to test conversion rate optimization.

Based on HubSpot, for example, you should set the goal of reaching a click-through rate of 1-2% and conversion rate of 10-20%. The test will analyze everything we mentioned before like color, content, size, and location, so basically, those are the features you should especially concentrate on when working on the CTA.

In the end

Like with everything else connected to the web development, you must be ahead of the competition and know all the current trends, even when it comes to something small like CTA. Don’t look at it as something you must use, but as the resource to further the communication with your visitors and broaden your relationship.

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Blake Davies
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