Whatever you are thinking of promoting, whether it’s your website, a product or service, or your business through an email, you need to pay special attention to your call-to-action (CTA). The CTA is your instructor for your reader after they have read what you have to say.
In short, this is a message that is only a few words but more valuable than a thousand words. Your CTA will be as good as your persuasiveness and show you how unique you are as a business.
To make your CTA hit higher conversions, it does take some practice. Well, don’t go anywhere because, in this article, we will show you the top 10 practices you can apply to get higher conversions with your CTA.
10 practices for achieving higher CTA conversions
1. Ensure your CTA is visible
While this may seem obvious to pay attention to, you’d be surprised at how many companies actually fail to do this. Sometimes, promotional managers will fail to set their CTA apart from other text parts. In other cases, they’ll provide too many CTAs which will then look spammy instead of user-friendly.
Overall, the CTA should be simple and easy to read and understand. Make it easy to distinguish it from other text parts and make it large enough for others to identify. Your CTA should be written clearly and directly on your landing page.
2. Try using action-oriented text
Your CTA is your Holy Grail. As you see above, this site allows you to click on ‘find out more’ and is associated with an action-oriented text.
Think about all the possible actions your clients can take, and write the most action-oriented text possible. Communications given to your users while actively using your app are known as in-app messages.
The ‘in-app messages’ part is the CTA and describes what your prospects expect to happen after they begin to do what they want.
You can choose other popular CTAs such as “Buy now,” “register,” “sign up,” and many more similar phrases you can think of.
Furthermore, you can also include a CTA that will further describe what the visitor can achieve. For example, “start your marketing career now,” “try out your free trial now,” and more ideas you can think of.
3. Pay attention to the colors
Your CTA colors do matter. In fact, they matter more than you may think, and you should pay special attention to them. According to a study, colors that stand out the most for your CTA are Red, Green, and Orange.
- Red: makes your web page stand out the most,
- Green will appeal to people concerned about the environment, health, and peace.
- Orange or even yellow promotes an exciting feeling.
If you’re not really sure what looks the best, run a squint test and see what looks the most appealing to you. However, if you want to find out which CTA button color will work the best for you, keep on testing! After all, every business is in its own industry and needs to test different colors to identify which one works best for you.
We showed you the best colors. Now, it’s time to show you which colors are the worst ones to use:
- Black is dark and will make people think that you didn’t care much about the CTA. However, let’s not forget that black tends to blend into backgrounds easily with most pages and is one of the worst colors to use for a CTA.
- Brown doesn’t promote any warm feeling and is also a dark color, just like Black. It isn’t a color that motivates customers to click on it and is perceived as dull and ugly.
- White is a bright color and does tend to look excellent, but it is actually a terrible button color to use if you want visitors to take action. You may ask why so? Well, because white blends in with backgrounds easily and doesn’t raise any emotions as other colors do. These are two primary concerns of using this color.
4. Make your text visible and not big
When you have more visitors on your site, especially from a mobile device, a visible and easy, and simple to read CTA is something you need. Even if someone only takes half a second to read your CTA, you should be able to read it easily.
You don’t want to do something wrong such as making the CTA way too big. It may look unprofessional and may make visitors uncomfortable in some way. Look at it from a mobile device to identify if your CTA is in the right place.
After all, more than five billion people worldwide are mobile users, so it’s important to optimize your CTA on mobile.
5. Button shape
Button shapes play a significant role whenever you attempt to craft the size and shape of your CTA button. First, you’ll need to choose between shapes. For example, do you want your CTA to be more rounded or square edges?
It’s quite challenging to distinguish what works best because both styles are common and can be performed in different settings. Overall, the best choice for you is to test each shape and see which one works best.
6. Try to keep your CTA short
CTA writers always have to undergo different issues, and one of them is to keep the CTA as short as possible. However, even though it’s pretty challenging to do, you need to try and get your point across with only a few words.
Including many words can mess up your design, and leaving a text that is too small or too large may demotivate viewers to click on the button. It may reduce the effectiveness of the CTA.
To keep everything ideal, write CTAs that are anywhere between two to five words. Then, rearrange and eliminate words until you have fully optimized the message you are trying to get across.
If you’re concerned about losing some important details, you can try to make more landing pages and focus on different campaign aspects. For example, one landing page can focus on free trials, while the other can focus on something else. It’s up to you!
7. The best CTA buttons link to one another
Your CTA buttons should all link to one another and are related to the copy that is on your page. As you design your pages for leading users to take action, you should also aim to place your CTA in the correct place, relatively close to the previous CTA.
Practical CTA buttons make it easy for you to convert and keep your audience. This requires them to follow a set of actions and ensure that you guide them on the right path.
However, depending on how you set your page up, it may not be as simple as you think. For instance, several websites use parallax scrolling. This design promotes users moving from one section to another and has its own discrete action.
If you place CTAs in only some of those sections, you can miss out on converting visitors. Now, think of how you can convert users as they scroll through your landing pages.
It’s always an excellent idea to ensure a CTA is close to the previous one. For example, below, you’ll see how Appcues used CTA buttons to link to one another. It says, “Start building for free,” You have the CTA “Get a demo.” So, this is an excellent example of CTAs that lead to one another.
8. Create a sense of urgency
Using urgency can be an excellent way to get people to click on your CTA. In fact, it’s proven to be the ‘hacker’ of conversion rates because people know they won’t have this opportunity tomorrow. We have an excellent example above with Appcues.
The CTA on the bottom right says “See how easy it is,” so this means that after a visitor scrolls and reads through the site, they’ll be concerned about seeing how easy Appcues actually is to use. For example, here are a few other CTA examples that create urgency:
- Sign up today and get a 70% off limited offer!
- Download our free E-book for 10% off, today only!
- Register for our online course, 20% off for those who register today!
The examples we showed above are an excellent way of creating urgency because they set a limited time frame destination. For example, when people know they won’t get a discount tomorrow, they’ll most likely sign up today.
9. Include a value proposition
The value proposition shows your prospect what you are going to offer them. Ideally, it’s some value they receive from you and isn’t offered by your competitors. So what kind of value are you offering? Is it a free demo of your product or service, a free ebook, or a free one-year subscription?
If you are offering something unique compared to your competitors, such as a free ebook, no credit card needed, or something else, you need to make an offer something better than what your competitor is offering. As we mentioned before, urgencies are an excellent way of showing your value proposition.
Let them know what is being offered and if it’s urgent or not.
Narrow down your value proposition to a few words and begin to write a few words that’ll create your high-converting CTA. Try to include this at the beginning or end of the landing page for the best results.
10. Test your CTAs
No matter what anybody recommends to you, you can’t have a successful CTA if you don’t put it to the test. Every new thing you try, put it to the test to see how well it does. As new technologies arise, so do new behaviors.
Also, as different generations shift in age, they’ll adopt new habits different from their predecessors. Above all, it’s vital you do what works best for your audience and not yourself.
Wrapping it up
That’s all in this article. These are our top 10 practices we recommend you use to get higher conversions for your landing pages. CTAs are the best way you can encourage people to try out your product and service. However, it’s underestimated by many businesses and not taken as seriously as it should be.
Above all, you want to continuously test your CTAs and see which one best fits your audience’s preferences.
