Prospective customers don’t always convert easily.
Simply keeping them engaged in the sales funnel can be a long and winding road. You want them to open your emails, read your blogs and interact with you on social media…
But boy oh boy do they need your help!
Enter the call to action, or CTA.
What Does A Call To Action Look Like?
CTAs are a marketing tool used to help herd your audience through the right gates. Compelling CTAs signpost where you want your readers to go next and what you want them to do.
Scroll up and cast your eyes to the top right of this page. That ‘Book a call’ button is a CTA.
The concise wording invites the reader to click a link, often in the form of a button. CTAs can feature anywhere there is a piece of marketing and takes the reader anywhere from a sign-up form to a sale-based landing page or simply the next in a series of blogs.
They keep the prospective customer moving through your sales funnel. Unfortunately, like all aspects of marketing, there is no one-size-fits-all approach for successful CTA writing.
If you combine the range of actions you might want a prospect to take with the variety of audiences looking at your marketing content, you might begin to understand why.
However, there are ways you can make yours stand out. But more on that later…
Why Do They Work?
Every piece of marketing you have NEEDS a compelling CTA because people dislike uncertainty.
And honestly, we’re a bit lazy. Telling people what to do at every step of the way helps to reduce friction and makes them feel secure in their decision-making. Think of them as reassuring directions that lead a user to their preferred destination.
Baby Steps
When using CTAs in your marketing efforts, you’ve got to take it slow. Be gentle.
It’s the same approach you take when nurturing your prospects. Give, give, give. You can’t just jump in demanding your prospective customer parts with their hard-earned cash straight away. You need to build trust first.
It’s the same when leading people to your required action. Even if your CTA will greatly benefit a business, go too big and it’ll be perceived as a risk.
Instead? One small CTA per piece of marketing is plenty. If you’re romancing your readers effectively and nurturing them with well-written, valuable content that makes them feel heard, small requests will be readily accepted.
Don’t be tempted to overcrowd your carefully crafted blogs, emails and webpages with too many requests, no matter how small they are. What you’re aiming for is just enough of a signpost to make it clear to the reader what you want them to do next…
Too much, too soon and your prospective customer will feel overwhelmed and quit.
Language Is Important
Compelling calls to action are relevant to the content they sit in. And they need that context. It’s no good floating a random CTA button in the middle of a page.
The language used for CTAs also needs to be concise and convey a sense of urgency to work well. It must be clear what you are asking of your prospect and why – what will clicking that button do for them that is so valuable?
As ever, practice makes perfect. Scribble down CTAs until they’re coming out of your ears to get a feel for different approaches.
Grab a pen. Or a keyboard. Here are a few top tips you can try out for size:
- Write using your audience’s voice. This can make the request feel less demanding and more relatable.
- Be nearly-rudely-blunt. This approach could be a bit Marmite depending on your audience but a dry tone can be bold and spirited, getting you noticed.
- Short, sharp action words work well to spell a CTA out clearly.
Pick your favourites and A/B test them to evaluate which is stronger. Data-informed marketing is always better marketing.
Best Examples
You might be wondering what sort of calls to action suit different types of content.
The short answer is it’s your website and your marketing campaigns… Do what you like!
But, generally speaking, the best examples of effective CTA usage look like this:
- For blogs, ask your reader to click through to a related blog post or sign up to your email list.
- If it’s an email campaign you’re writing, quite often CTAs offering up webpages or blogs relevant to the subject matter are a great way to herd your readers to your website.
- Your website itself will feature different CTAs in different places. Your homepage, for example, should host quite a few because people visiting it are less likely to know what they want or need yet. Links to free resources, ‘products like these’ or related services are all common on other page formats. And as ever, an ‘enquire now’ or ‘sign up’ CTAs are commonly prevalent website-wide.
The Takeaways
Great CTAs are clear, concise, low risk and high value. They are also relevant to the content surrounding them.
Using snappy language and persuasive copy increases the chance of a reader clicking through because it is clear what they should do and WHY they should do it.
Writing CTAs for your marketing campaigns and designing how they look is doable for anyone going it alone. With the right research and understanding, it really is. But if you don’t have time for it or it feels overwhelmingly daunting, let me help. Book a call and let’s talk it through.
