The No-Brainer’s Guide to Call-to-Actions

The countless times you downloaded Dropbox, Spotify or even Evernote?  Perhaps you even signed up for an online class!

The fact is that you signed up for each of these products as a result of an effective call-to-action (CTAs).

And that’s basically all that matters in as far as generating leads is concerned. Strategic CTAs come in handy when guiding your customers to a buying expedition and you’ll be surprised, a larger percentage of all products you purchase are largely influenced by the CTAs you get daily.

The fundamental element of any successful inbound marketing strategy is a well-crafted CTA copy. You see, CTAs serve to instruct your visitors to make suitable purchase decisions. Without them, your entire website’s traffic would go to waste. In other words, a call to action translates traffic into leads. They are the conversion points where passive traffic is converted into active prospects.

With a well-crafted CTA, you can persuade your visitors to read your emails or perform specific tasks such as purchasing a product, subscribing to the mailing list and so on.  Great CTAs are designed with a text placed on a button or simply a link with the right anchor text.

Kathryn Aragon describes CTAs as, “the final instruction you give to your reader.” As a marketer, you should leverage on CTAs when you want your website viewer to complete a task. Having great content on your website is good. Having people come back for more is better but until your readers take the intended action, the task stands incomplete.

As a matter of fact, great content aims at helping your readers make the right purchase decision which is why you need CTAs to achieve that purpose. Whenever a visitor takes an action based on your CTA, it is referred to as conversion—and every marketer targets excellent conversions!

You need to understand a buyer’s psychology when designing a CTA. Research shows that most people take actions based on whether it is logical and likely to benefit them. Surprisingly, so many companies miss out on forming a deeper connection with their potential customers. According to SmallBizTrends, close to 70% of startups and small businesses lack appropriate CTAs on their sites. Don’t add your business to these statistics!

Rule of the thumb: When deciding on the CTAs to use on your site, consider your site’s content and design CTAs that strongly relate to your products.

You should also seek to find out what is the greatest motivation for your visitors taking action on that content. Once you have identified your reader’s motivations, use the call-to-action to send a clear message about the benefits they stand to get when they take the intended action.

With a thousand and one distractions on the Internet today, crafting a great CTAs that will capture the reader’s attention in a split second and lead to conversions can be a daunting task.

But you don’t have to worry. We’ve done the heavy lifting for you and dissected the building block that makes up great CTAs. Here, we’ll discuss the fundamentals of excellent CTAs that will generate more leads. And the best part is that they are a low hanging fruit and so you will find they are easy to implement.

Always Have a Call-to-Action above the Fold

This one is a piece of cake but don’t be fooled—over 80% of web owners still don’t get it!

Your site visitors will scroll down to the end of your page and you’ll have all the time in the world to make a lasting impression.

WRONG!!

Let’s set the facts straight. You should always perceive your website visitors as having the worst case of attention deficit disorder and you will always be right—or at least most of the time.

You have a split second to capture the attention of your potential customers and to make a lasting impression. A split second to persuade website visitors to take action and so, having a call to action above the fold, is a smart bet.

For Longer Content Have a Follow-up Call-to-Action Toward the Bottom

When writing a long blog post, you need to place the most relevant call to actions at the bottom of the post.

Here, you’ll not need to reuse your sidebar calls to action and assume that everything’s hunky-dory. Place a CTA at the end of the very end of the post. You want the reader to take action when they are done reading the article!

Be Clear and Concise about the Offer

Take, for instance, a call to action that reads “download free black paper.”This CTA lacks a clear, concise message that the reader would understand easily. With a vague call-to-actions, you should expect a lower click-through rate.

Using Contrasting Colors That Stand Out

The point is, if your call to action colors blends perfectly with the sites background color, no one will notice it. It is like buying an ad on a blimp that is painted blue with clouds on it.

If your call-to-action button/link is not captivating to the eye, it will not attract many clicks through and that means it will not head to the conversion page.

Most Important: Make it Contextually Relevant

Let’s take, for instance, a website that sells insurance policies. So, you’ll find policies such as home insurance, health insurance, marine insurance,and stuffed pet insurance (the latter is probably not real but it ought to be).

Now, if you were the owner of such a business and wanted keyword rich content, it would make much more sense to have relevant CTAs on your website’s sidebar.

You should find contextually relevant CTAs for better conversions. As a matter of fact, Google uses the exact concept with their AdWords.

There you have it, folks! Whether you’re creating a new website or a simple blog post or social media, your journey to creating great calls to action will be easy-peasy with this guide—every visitor will thank you for it!