Understanding Calls to Action
Visitors to your website are there for a reason. They want to know more about you, and for a few brief moments, you have their full attention. Don’t waste it.
Calls-to-action (CTA) are the few, vital words that convert website visitors into clients, customers and members. They are your one chance to steer a user through your site, and to make sure they see what you want them to.
For instance, say you’re an organizational behavior specialist looking to promote a new consulting service. You don’t want to overhaul your entire website to focus on just that one new service.
Instead, you use a CTA on your homepage to draw in potential clients who are interested in your new service. You give a teaser line about how your consulting service works, and follow up with a CTA that reads “Learn more.” When a visitor clicks on that link, they are taken to a page devoted to your new consulting service and you’re one step closer to engaging them as a client.
Good CTAs all have a few things in common. They use strong, active verbs. They appear on every page of your site. They are visually set apart by their use of color or positioning on the page. And they exist for the purpose of conversion – the transformation of a website visitor into the client/customer/member your organization depends on.
It’s a good idea to have more than one CTA on your website. In fact, when you consider where to place your CTAs you may find that it makes sense to put more than one on any given page. This is particularly true on your home page. A visitor to your site might not be ready to sign up for your newsletter right off the bat, but clicking on “Learn more,” and reading about your services requires little commitment. (The Tripepi Smith home page has three distinct CTAs.) Once users see that you have great content to offer, that visitor may be much more likely to share their email with you. (If you scroll down a bit, you’ll notice we’ve given you an opportunity to join the Tripepi Smith mailing list at the bottom of this very page.)
Of course, you can always sweeten your CTA with a little creative thinking. Say you run a membership-based organization and you are working to increase your reach through social media. Your CTA could say: “Like us on Facebook and receive a 10% discount on your first year of membership.”
CTAs are only limited by your imagination. Update them regularly to keep your site engaging and to promote any aspect of your business that could use a boost.