When Is It Important To Have Call To Action?
The other day a friend of mine – business coach and facilitator called me for consultation. She sounded really concerned and she wanted to discuss this Call to Action thing that someone brought to her. I have to admit that she listens to her audience very carefully and tries to respond to the needs presented. She is also in the process of revamping her website so she is particularly cautious for comments related to the user experience (UX). Somebody in her audience mentioned “There is no call to action under your photo on the website where you invite people to your blog. You need to have it, absolutely”. Instinctively she was sure she needs it, yet a little voice in her head called for consultation and check-up. And you know what? I have looked at this particular place on her website, we discussed her method of acquiring new clients and we decided to leave it as it is for the moment. Why? Here is the story.
The Ultimate Guide To Call to Action
Call To Action (CTA) is heavily used in inbound marketing to generate leads. In fact, CTA is a kind of instruction to the visitor of your website on what to do next. You simply guide your audience almost by hand towards required action. What kind of action, you may ask? Well, there are many possibilities. You may want your visitors to sign up for your newsletter or perhaps you wish to give the demo of your product, or simply you may want them to go to the landing page (LP) devoted to the specific product and finalize transaction there – say buy the car insurance. CTA comes in two graphic forms – it is either an active link or a button redirecting to the targeted subpage or landing page. The other story is the text you use on your CTA button or link. The aim of this piece of copy is to grab the attention of the visitor and persuade him/her to do the required action. This is a true art and you need to have this ability to speak your customer language and understand his/her pain points. You may have noncomplicated texts like: “Sign up” or “Enrol”, but you may have “Join the thousands of satisfied professionals” or “Let’s start together” or “Find out when we have more” or “Grow your list fast”. Believe it or not but the selection of the words can make a difference of few percents in conversion and it is worth fighting for. The best selection of call to action templates you can find at Hubspot. My friend created a small button with her photo and text inviting to her blog. That is already classic CTA! It would be weird if she pushed with this button to collect personal data to build her mailing list. Her blog is free although some articles could be sold on subscription, that is another story. You do not ask people for data if there is no value in what you offer instead.
Whatever the action you expect from your audience it would make sense to measure the results afterward once you decided to build such a novelty into your communication. You need to be aware of why people are clicking different elements on your web and what is the reason one piece of communication works better than the other. Smart people are testing content and graphics of their CTAs, they check if the yellow button works better than the grey one and text A is more persuasive than text B. It is also an art. Art of analytics. We will be speaking about this more in the near future.
