How to create strong calls to action for your website
If you’ve got a website, chances are you invested the time, energy and money into it with the hope that it would do something positive for your business. The bad news is that positive action isn’t going to come from your target customers with a website that is passive - one that simply describes what you do or sell.
Whether your website is there to sell something, generate leads for your business or simply to spread your message, you need to use a Call to Action (CTA) to achieve that goal.
What is a website call to action (CTA)?
So, what do I actually mean by a CTA? It’s simple really: a website Call to Action is an instruction to a visitor to do something.
Here are some common website CTA examples:
Subscribe to our mailing list
Book a consultation
Download the PDF guide
Sign up
A call to action needs to be three things:
Clear
Concise
Compelling
As the above examples stand, they are clear and concise but perhaps not compelling.
The key to creating a strong Call to Action is to give an incentive for completing the desired action.
See these re-vamped CTAs which give the reader more of a reason to do what you are asking of them:
Subscribe to our mailing list to receive your free how-to guide
Book a consultation by the end of the month and receive 10% off your purchase
Download the PDF guide to start building your dream business
Sign up now for a free trial
See the difference? You are answering the website visitor’s unspoken question of “why should I bother?”
How many CTAs does a website need?
You should aim to have one CTA on every page of your website. Don’t get carried away though - stick to one CTA per page (or per section if you have a page that’s split up that way).
Don’t confuse your visitors with too many signposts to complete too many different actions - you’ll leave their heads spinning and chances are they’ll bounce right off your website without doing anything you want them to.
CTAs are great for reducing the bounce rate of your website (the number of people that leave your site after viewing just one page).
You need a combination of CTAs that encourage the visitor to continue their journey around your website and those that instruct the visitor to hand over their contact details - probably just a name and email address in the first instance.
A CTA doesn’t need to be a button or a form to complete. It can simply be a hyperlinked line of text that tells the reader where to go next. I’ll often use this in my blog posts to pass the reader on to the next relevant article.
Let me reiterate that: every webpage needs to either direct the visitor to the next relevant page or capture their contact details.
Using website CTAs to collect email addresses
Collect email addresses via your website should be high on your priority list; using email to continue to market to people AFTER they’ve left your website is an exceptionally powerful marketing tactic.
It can be a big leap from visiting a website for the first time to booking a consultation or making a purchase. You’ll know from your own website browsing that you’ll often research products and services that you’re interested in before buying.
This is where email marketing comes in.
I have seen the most success with converting website visitors to customers by playing the long game and keeping prospects engaged with email marketing.
When they are ready to buy, they will remember you are there.
I’ll cover email marketing in my next blog. Subscribe to The Cheer List to be notified when that blog is live so you don’t need to check back to find it yourself (see what I did there with the CTA?).
What does the perfect website CTA look like?
There are several formats your website CTA can take:
A bar across the top of your website
A pop-up which could be on exit intent (catch them before they click away), on 50% scroll of your page (they’re likely interested if they’ve got that far) or after a time delay (they’ve been reading the page for 1 minute, let’s hit them with a CTA).
A static form which could be anywhere on your page.
A button - it could say ‘sign up’
A text hyperlink - e.g. ‘read the next blog’.
All of these formats have a place and you should try them all out to see which ones work best on your website.
Here are some of the best website CTAs that I have come across:
Marie Forleo's full screen pop-up.
Neil Patel’s newsletter sign up form.
Jenna Kutcher’s top bar call to action.
Denise Duffield-Thomas’s button call to action.
Amy Porterfield’s button call to actions.
How to write a strong website CTA
Copywriting plays a big part in crafting a strong CTA. You need to convey the value in the action you are asking your visitor to complete and you need to do this quickly and in just a few words.
This is very tricky to achieve! However, don’t feel that you have to reinvent the wheel. If you see a great CTA being used somewhere, you can certainly adapt it to fit your message and offering.
Often you will use a blurb to describe the benefits of the action you want visitors to take and then use a button. Wording on this button needs to be short and snappy. Here are some ideas of what your button might say:
Sign up
Subscribe
Try for free
Get started
Learn more
Join us
Website form CTA best practices
When using forms on your website to capture visitor details, you need to keep it short and sweet. In the first instance, simply ask for first name and email address. You will be tempted to ask lots of questions about your visitors and I get it - who are they? What do they want? It’s all too tempting to request a life story. STOP! Keep it simple or you will capture zero information.
You can of course have longer forms on your website and your ‘Contact’ page is the perfect place to do so. If you have a form where interested visitors can submit a question, it’s reasonable to ask for a little more information.
Perhaps ask for a company name, job title and phone number. Unless these details are imperative to the enquiry (I bet they are not) leave them as optional fields. Don't scare people off by being too nosey.
I’d argue that only the email address should be a mandatory field.
Conclusion
Let’s recap on why your website needs CTAs and how you go about making them compelling.
You need to include CTAs on your website to make it pay. Getting your website visitors to complete a desired action or hand over their contact details is marketing gold and something you must work towards achieving to get a return on the investment of your website.
Website CTAs can be built in many formats but whatever they look like, they must be clear, concise and compelling. Answer the question: why should I do what you are asking?
Experiment with a combination of text hyperlinks, forms, buttons and pop-ups. Include a CTA on every page.
I’d love to see some examples of your new website CTAs as well as the best-performing examples on your own website. Blow your own trumpet in the comments below and I promise I’ll head over to your website for a look. If your CTAs are that good, I may even hand over my email address.
WANT SOME HELP WITH WRITING MARKETING EMAILS?
Take a look at my Email Marketing Toolkit. My goal is to make it as easy as possible for you to write strong emails which stand out from everything else that fills our inboxes!
