A call to action is a term used relentlessly in marketing. It’s a piece of content used to prompt an immediate response or encourage a specific action from a user, and when I tell you it’s important, believe me, it’s really important.
Why is it important?
It’s very likely that adding a CTA will increase your conversion rates.
Why does it increase conversion rates?
You’re directing your user to a final stage, hand in hand so they don’t get lost, distracted, or bored, which is quite seriously a possibility as the internet is a wormhole of distractions. I covered this in a blog I did a few months ago on How To Write Great Ads.
There’s a problem though…
There’s a lot of ads, social media posts, products, and websites out there. That means a lot of people are using the same call to action. Which is boring. No one is excited by them anymore, we’ve been there, we’ve seen it, we’ve got the T-shirt.
I’ll show you…
My first 4 results on a search for ‘laptops’ gave me a CTA pool of; ‘buy now’, ‘order now’ and two saying ‘shop now’. I don’t know about you, but I’m not currently feeling inspired to buy a laptop.
Now I appreciate that they genuinely want me to buy a laptop, and they probably want me to do it now, so I appreciate that they want to tell me to buy it now. However, as a user, I’m looking for something that stands out from a crowd of competitors. With them being so similar I’d look at different factors such as if there are any offers and sense of urgency that you can see in the second ad example. I often find that a sense of urgency can push a user over the converting line as it’s a tad more compelling.
We’re likely never going to be able to ditch words like buy, shop, download, call, etc. because ultimately that’s the end goal. That’s not to say that we can’t jazz those phrases up though. This is where you can have some testing fun too.
Here’s a tip for writing your CTA; go into a toddler mentality. Let me show you…
‘Get in touch today!’ - Why?
‘Download our whitepaper here!’ - Why?
‘Shop online now!’ - Why?
‘Subscribe to the newsletter’ - Why?
Now an alternative approach:
Instead of ‘book a home visit’ try ‘get the kitchen you’ve always dreamed of’.
Instead of ‘subscribe to our newsletter’ try ‘get marketing insights from industry professionals’.
There are loads of different ways to put an exciting spin on things which can work in your favour - and often even a really subtle change can have a positive impact so that’s why you test your little heart out.
This blog from Hubspot is really interesting in showing examples of good call to actions. But here’s a couple of my favourites.
So now we’ve heard the hard, cold truth and the sudden realisation has sunk in that maybe some of our CTA actions aren’t up to scratch - and don’t worry because everyone falls into that trap sometimes, it’s time to go and test some new, jazzier call to actions.
