What is a Call to Action?

A Call-to-Action (CTA) is a method of invoking a particular reaction out of a potential lead. The purpose of a CTA is to convert visitors into leads, which means it needs to be highly targeted. A Call-to-Action must be coupled with a targeted landing page to be successful.

What Should Your Call-to-Action Be About?

The sales cycle has five phases namely:

Awareness
Research
Vendor Research
Choice of Vendor
Purchase

Your website should cater for all of the phases of the sales cycle, and the best way of doing this is through well-planned CTAs. Your website’s content should attract users and lead them to your various CTAs.

Online CTAs are an ongoing study, which means you should constantly be monitoring and changing your CTAs to improve their success rate. There are numerous ways to test and optimise your CTAs. For example: Which of your landing pages are the most successful? Consider the wording and offering of those CTAs and use them as a reference for others. CTAs are great for upcoming and previous campaigns, for example: use CTAs to lead clients to your social media platforms and events, such as your blog, Facebook, PPC ads etc.

Types of CTAs

Graphic based CTAs:

Graphic based CTAs have two main elements: what the CTA says and what the CTA looks like. Graphic based CTAs are often found on the top or right hand side of the page, try experimenting with different coloured CTAs as they invoke different feelings in people. For some people actual graphics are more important than colour so try different variations until you get it just right. An important factor which most graphic CTAs have is a clickable button, with text prompting the user to click the button; this is done to show the user that the CTA is clickable and that it is not a web ad or random pop-up.

Text based CTAs:

Text based CTAs only have one element - text. They should be casual and fall in with your other information; these CTAs are often slightly more direct, for example: “Click here for a quotation”.
A CTA out performing another may vary according to many factors; the trick is finding the most efficient combination of elements. People might find the look of the graphic CTA appealing, or maybe a more direct line of text will strike them. Use traceable links on all of your CTAs to see how they are performing and compare views to click-throughs. You should change your CTAs on a regular basis, use a different few every week, if you notice certain ones are performing well, reuse them, or even use different derivatives of them until you’ve narrowed down a few CTAs which work really well.

Beware: You can place CTAs everywhere but never place a CTA on a landing page, CTAs should lead to landing pages; you don’t want to re-redirect the visitor.

Optimising Your CTAs

There are 9 crucial steps to optimising your CTAs:

1.    Don’t be vague:
Ensure that the potential leads know exactly what the CTA is offering, for example:” Click here to sign up to the newsletter”.
2.    Make them prominent:
Highlight, bold, change the text colour. You want your CTAs to stand out; often people will scan through a page as they simply want a link to a quote or want to be directed to a landing page.
3.    Encourage action:
Call-to-Actions should prompt your visitor to perform an action: “Click here,” Download,” “Register here.”
4.    Placement:
Keep it “above the fold” – an expression used to explain the first and top page of the website, consider the flow of the page, does the CTA catch your eye? You want the visitor to notice the CTA as soon as they open the page.
5.    Fitting in:
The CTA should relate to the information on the page, a random CTA will look unprofessional and potentially confuse the visitor.
6.    Link between CTA and landing page:
Keep the information between the CTA and the landing page consistent, use similar language, imagery, text and fonts etc.
7.    Landing page optimisation:
Experiment with different page layout, imagery and form lengths etc. See what works, which types of landing pages get the highest info submission rates.
8.    Cater for all stages of the sale cycle:
Have CTAs linking people to more information regarding a specific topic, quotations or free consultations. Have at least three CTAs on your homepage, one for early, mid and late sales cycle visitors.
9.    Test your CTAs:
Keep testing your CTAs to optimise visitor-to-lead conversion.

Testing

Testing is one of the most important factors when using CTAs. You have to be able to measure whether they are working or not, but how? Here are some key metrics you can use to track your call to actions and calculate their success rates.
•    Click-Through Rate: How many people saw the CTA and how many people clicked on it?
•    Click-to-Submission Rate: The number of people who clicked the CTA and filled out the form or gave their information.
•    View-to-Submission Rate:  The number of people who viewed the CTA and in turn filled it out.

CTAs That Do Not Work

There are three CTAs that you should avoid. They have been used time and time again and the results are almost never satisfactory.
•    Contact Us: This is probably the oldest CTA on the net. It is very vague. And how would they benefit from contacting you?
•    Click Here: The second most used CTA on the net, very similar to the ‘Contact us’ CTA. It is vague and doesn’t convey any value.
•    Animated CTA: This is an amateur mistake, because although flashing, changing or moving things on screen do catch the eye, they are immediately dismissed as spam.

CTAs should take the clicker straight to a landing page. They don’t want to go on a “click safari” just to be added to a mailing list. After the second click they would have lost interest. These two web components go hand in hand, and when practiced correctly will result in a huge increase in leads.  And of course (provided you nurture them properly) more leads mean more business.

Previous article in the series: An Introduction to PPC Ads

Sound Idea Digital is a full service digital agency | www.soundidea.co.za

Julian Karstel is a Digital Marketing Consultant for Sound Idea Digital | @JulianKarstel | Julian@soundidea.co.za

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