A call to action or CTA is usually a short phrase that tells potential customers what to do next. It is a text prompt designed to inspire the target audience or potential customers to take a desired action, such as buying a product, signing up for a service, etc. No matter how great your product is or how professionally built your website is, if you don’t tell people what to do next or how to move forward, you can miss out on a lot of potential customers and sales.
A clear and compelling call to action is necessary to convert your visitors into happy customers. Most small businesses miss out on a lot of potential customers and sales because they don’t have a proper call to action and aren’t telling people what to do next. An easy solution to this is to write a compelling call to action. Below we have mentioned some tips that can help you to write a clear and convincing call to action for your business.
Start With An Action Verb
Starting your call to action with an action verb is always the right thing to do. In order to convince and persuade people to take your desired action, you will have to start with a strong action verb or command verb, that tells them exactly what you want them to do. Examples of action verbs that you should use in CTA include buy, try, subscribe, sign up, join, enroll, shop, download, save, get, start, and schedule.
Be Clear, Not Creative
Since call-to-action are marketing messages, you will have to be clear in creating them. Although you can come up with unique and witty phrases, these don’t make a huge impact when persuading your potential audience to take your desired action. Being clear in your call-to-action message makes it easy for the target audience or potential customers to understand what you want them to do.
Always make sure that your call to action is simple, clear, and easy to understand. Prioritize clarity over creativeness, as it will lead to better conversions.
Keep it Short
Keeping your call to action as short, clear, and concise, as possible will help you to generate the best results. The best call-to-action are those that are concise and clear, like those of Aconex. If you want to generate more conversions through a call-to-action, keep the text on call-to-action under 7 seconds. A call-to-action text of 2-5 words is considered ideal.
The purpose of a call-to-action is to tell people what action to take next or what you want them to do and it should only direct people what you want them to do. A call-to-action is not responsible for convincing people, rather its only purpose is to tell people what to do next. It is the job of the rest of your marketing campaign to convince people.
Use Urgency
Urgency is the basis of a compelling call to action. By adding urgency to your call to action, you can increase your conversions or the desired action significantly. Urgency compels people to add quickly and by adding words like “today” and “now”, you can make your call to action more convincing and compelling, like how Home Depot does it with its call-to-action buttons.
Use the same CTA Throughout
Being consistent in your call-to-action is also very important. Once you write a compelling CTA, you should stick to the same text and formatting throughout. Although you might get the idea to use different call-to-action texts and formatting for different sections, you won’t do any good by using different CTA for different sections because you will end up confusing your potential customers and target audience.
The call-to-action button should have the same text and formatting, wherever you are using them on your website so that your visitors don’t get confused by different call-to-action buttons.