A gun without bullets is useless, and so is a website without a call to action. A call to action is literally as the name suggests, it prompts your visitor to take action on your website like filling a contact form, booking a call downloading an e-book, or subscribing to your newsletter. If your website does not have a clear call to action, or you do not have a website at all, you could be losing thousands of dollars in sales!
No Calls To Action
Businesses create websites mainly because they want to get more customers. Sadly this doesn't just happen simply because your website is getting a lot of traffic, or it's ranking certain keywords on Google Search. You need to ask your visitors to contact you, that's where the call to action plays an important role, converting those visitors into leads and customers.
No Valuable Content
A common mistake in most website is that a company will talk about themselves, how great they are, how may years of experience they have. On their blog you find something like how they recently hired the great CEO or some other form content that has nothing to do with what they are selling. Let me be the first to tell you this, your customers don't care!
They care mostly about what you can do for them, how can you solve their problem and what value they get after that. You can do this by educating your customers, answering their their questions and giving all the information they need before doing business with you.
When a prospect visits your website, they have 3 questions. One, Is this for me? Two, Can I trust you? Three, What next? To answer the first question, get back to your value proposition and differentiate yourself from your competition. Talk about the benefits your customer will get after using your services or product.
For the second you need to establish credibility, they need to trust you, you can do this by including customer testimonials.
As of what next, that's where your call to action plays its role. Every time you create a call to action, combine that with killer copy, you will start seeing results. The copy includes headlines and subheadings just before the call to action. Also, pay attention to the text on the button itself, for example, book a call is better than the generic contact us. If you have many ideas for your copy, run A/B tests and see which combination converts better.
Color and contrast
The idea of a call to action is to grab the visitor's attention and persuade them to do a specific action. Your call to action must be calling for attention. For example, if you have a light background your CTA should have a contrasting background. The other common mistake most people do (even myself) is to use the primary brand color as the call to action color, instead, find another contrasting color to make sure your CTAs stand out.
Offer a reward
Before you ask anyone to submit a contact form or subscribe to your newsletter, ask yourself “what's in it for them?”, “why would they want to do that?”. If it's a contact form, pay attention to your value proposition. Make sure you are focusing on the benefits of using your product or working with you. If it's an email list or other lead gen use a lead magnet, offer your visitors something valuable like an e-book in exchange for their email address or phone number. Remember, every time you want to create a CTA, ask yourself what's in it for them.
Remove friction
Remember your competition is just one click away, the user will just click back and click on another link in the search results if your website is frustrating. Make sure your site loads fast and is mobile responsive. Another source of friction is long forms. Although it's a good idea to gather more info about the prospect to qualify the lead, sometimes that may cost you leads because people are lazy. If you need long forms, it's a good idea to promise the user that it's not going to take longer to fill the form. You may even be precise and say a minute or less.
The other way that you can get the most out of your website is by putting a call to action where it's more likely to be noticed first. Like above the fold, this is the section of your website that a visitor sees first before they scroll down. And put another at the bottom of the site because users mostly skim and scroll through the site, but when they get to the bottom they will notice your CTA.
Are you struggling to get more customers or clients online? We are here to help, you can contact us here or see our recent work.
