The whole point of your website is to enable your business to accomplish its sales and revenue goals. It’s vital to ensure that visitors to your site actually do want you want them to do, which can be achieved much more easily when you make intelligent use of Calls to Action (CTAs).
What is a CTA?
It’s all about getting your website visitors from point A to point B, and then onto C, D and E, if necessary. Calls-to-action help to make it a breeze to navigate a website, and in fact, you’ve probably seen loads of them on other sites without necessarily recognising them as CTAs.
More simply, a CTA can be described as the point at which you are directed to the next step in the website user experience. It can take the form of a button, image or text link that commands you to perform a certain action.
The journey that CTAs take a user on is known in SEO terms as the conversion funnel. CTAs appeal to the basic human instinct to look for something more once finished with something, so as a website owner, it’s crucial to consider what next step you want the user on a given page of your site to take.
It’s important to do your CTAs well
Let’s imagine that a visitor to your site is on the About Us page, or perhaps reading a product description. From reading this part of your site, they’ll already know a certain amount about you, your brand and product or service offering. But you’ll naturally want them to continue developing a relationship with your business.
That’s why you’ll want to use calls-to-action to gradually get them to know, like and trust you more. You might want to guide them to read an article, watch a video, book an appointment, contact you or purchase your product or service right now.
That’s what great calls-to-action help you to do. The best CTAs tend to use direct language such as:
- Buy
- Subscribe
- Register
- Book
- Contact
- Donate
CTAs can also assist in boosting cross-selling. If you have a product or service related in some way to the product or service the customer is already looking at, a CTA can direct them to consider this alternative option.
How else can you ensure your CTAs really work?
Whenever you come up with a CTA, ask yourself whether it:
- Stands out and is easily seen
- Concisely conveys the value of what it’s directing the user to
- Consists of copy that will entice the user to click on it
CTAs may be a seemingly simple element of your website given the rather more complex digital marketing services out there. However, they can certainly pack a punch in enabling you to make the most of every visitor to your site and provide them with a sense of direction.
Don’t take your site for granted. Make good use of calls-to-action with a little help from our experts here at PENNInk Productions, and you can really maximise your site’s effectiveness.
Edward Solomon has over 30 years’ experience in project management, technical education, computer networking, web design and development and is a Digital Business Consultant for PENNInk Productions Ltd.
