What is a Call to Action?
A call to action is a link leading to your landing page that tells users what you’re offering. Calls to action are commonly seen as buttons, images and lines of text. A study from Wordstream revealed that emails with a call to action button increased clicks by 371% and sales by 1617%. By learning to use calls to action effectively, you can easily achieve results like these on your website.
How do I use an Effective Call to Action?
Simply putting a line of text saying “click here!” won’t be very effective. There are several steps you can take to make sure that users do something when they are displayed with your call to action.
- Make it action oriented- Tell the user to do something, for example “download” or “click”.
- Make it eye catching- Make sure that it is the first thing users sees to maximise the chances of clicking on it.
- Keep it above the fold- Like above, this makes sure the user will see the call to action. This will maximise its chance of being clicked on.
- Make it clear what the offer is- Users will have no reason to click on your call to action without any offer or proposal. Placing the offer on the button itsself will make the offer more obvious for the user to see.
- Make your call to action look like a button- This study found that when calls to action were made to look like buttons using 3D effects, clicks were increased by 45%.
- Use scarcity to encourage action- If you are selling something with limited stock on your website this technique is very effective. Drawing extra attention to the fact that the stock is limited can encourage users to buy because they will fear that if they do not buy your product it will be gone. Booking.com uses this technique well, shown below.
How do Calls to Action Work?
Calls to action take advantage of the user’s curiosity and anticipation. When the user sees a call to action on your website, it must display and offer. This way they will anticipate getting something out of your call to action, and will be much more likely to click it. To take advantage of curiosity, many effective calls to action utilise words such as “secrets” and phrases like “tips the pros use”. Good calls to action also give a glimpse into what they’re offering without giving away too much information for free. Sometimes a short bullet points or a short summary is used. This makes the user curious to find out more about the small amount of information they have been given. By taking advantage of these two factors of anticipation and curiosity, your call to action could become extremely effective.
Calls to action can massively increase the sales and click rates on your website. By following the tips above, you could use calls to action to draw people to to your website and even use psychology to gain more profit from your website.