Inspire Action: Get Conversions With These CTA Best Practices

To turn your leads into customers, you need to provide an exciting experience in the buyer journey. From the content served up in the search engine to the first thing they see and read on your site to the checkout experience, it all needs to be engaging and flow smoothly. 

Part of that engagement on your site includes a call to action or CTA. Calls to action guide the user in the buying journey on what to do next. Having a weak CTA is one of the main reasons why visitors don’t convert to customers. Wording, color, positioning, and other factors make all the difference. Take the time to optimize your CTAs to gain these valuable conversions with the following best practices.

Keep Your Message Brief

Visitors want to find a solution to what they need quickly. They don’t want to read paragraphs to know where to go next for that solution. Utilize the “KISS” method and keep your message short and simple. Use no more than four words if possible, and make it a strong statement with action verbs. 

Instill Urgency in Your CTA

Users are more likely to click the CTA, knowing that there is limited time to take action or scarcity of the solution they are seeking. Create time-related messaging, such as “Shop Now,” “Sign Up Today,” or “Last Chance” to give the impression that otherwise, they may be missing out. 

Write Copy With the User in Mind

Do your research on the people visiting your site. Understand what they may be looking for when they visit and deliver the value they will get by choosing you. Part of this means understanding what the visitor may want to avoid as well. Provide benefits and offers, and provide solutions to user objections. For example visitors may not want to pay a fee. Implement the solution in your call to action, for example, Join for Free.  

Use Responsive Design

More than likely, the traffic to your site is coming from a mobile device. Make sure you have a responsive design in place for your website to ensure good user experience. Double-check that your call to action buttons are easy to read and proportioned correctly for mobile users. 

Utilize Contrasting Colors, Buttons and White Space

Your CTA should stand out and be the first thing users see on your landing page. Using contrasting colors will keep your call to action highly visible and not blend into the rest of the page. Make your CTA a clickable button, and ensure there is enough white space surrounding the button to make it stand out more. 

Test and Iterate Your CTA

Test your CTA button before it’s live on your page. Double-check that it is directing to the correct page and that the target page is working. Does the target page give the user the information they need? Once you have the CTA live on your site, monitor your conversions, and consider A/B testing. Serving two slightly different CTAs on your website will help you determine what works best for your visitors to gain those valuable conversions. 

Now that you know what you need for a high-converting call to action, get to writing. If this feels out of your wheelhouse, our design, development, and marketing team will take care of it for you. We implement the best website and marketing practices with your goals in mind.