Your prospective consumer desperately wants to know where you are taking them next.
That is where you can have the best, “call-to-action” compelling them to navigate to the page you want to.
Call-to-action or as we also call them CTA not only makes it less ambiguous, but it also enhances the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns.
But, no common call-to-action will work. Going with the traditional approach will never get you to the result. It will vanish before you know it!
If you want to fly the ball to the walls with your call-to-action then you need to hit the target harder. Your audience is smarter than ever! You have to learn how to write a convincing call-to-action and how to educate them with catchy & captivating CTA.
What is a Call-to-action or CTA?
A Call-to-action is a convincing invitation to the audience to take some desired action. A company or an organization will put CTA anywhere they think readers are looking through. They create this Call-to-Action to drive consumers to subscribe, input some information, browse products, or buy a product. A brand will often use them at the end of a video, a blog post, or on a website.
Call-to-Action in Marketing:
For marketers, CTA can play an important role in the game. It can help marketers drive audiences to follow a marketing campaign. Indeed, the goal of any marketing campaign itself is to guide the audience through the buyers’ journey and finally convert them. But, every marketing campaign has a different goal and encourages the audience towards taking different actions. There are certainly different ways and tactics to guide the audience to buy your product. Here are some types of Call-to-action you can use in your marketing campaigns.
Subscribe: This CTA does not encourage your customers to purchase a product or service. But, it invites them to get updates & newsletters from the company. Through this, the company wants to establish a healthy relationship with its customers, and help them find reasons to fall in love with their product, services & offers.
Try for free: Almost every company uses a free trial offer to lure customers and build trust in them. These calls-to-action drives people towards taking a demo, and then deciding whether they are still interested in the product or service.
Join us: You will need to place a “Join us” CTA if you are based on a collaboration between readers & customers. For example, if you are someone who manages an online community.
Sign up: In a “Sign Up” CTA, the audience is invited to sign up for activities like for an online course or a free trial, for an event, or a webinar.
Learn more: The “learn more” CTA is used to invite people to know more about a product or a service. You do this to prepare your customer to convert to a buyer.
Get started: This CTA can be used for a variety of purposes. For instance, you can ask your audiences to “Get Started” to experience virtual reality or for a free trial and many such.
How Great calls-to-action can Help Convert Leads?
If your most sales pages and landing pages are not leading to converting leads, then you must reconsider the CTA you have used. It may be lacking a sense of urgency.
B2B Digital marketers must include effective CTA to engage their most ideal customers. As per research data, around 70% of the B2B sites are not using CTA and that is why the right messages are not reaching the right audience. That is where you need to work and clarifying your customers must move next.
Just flimsy excuses for not incorporating effective call-to-action would not do. You must focus on helping your customers make decisions with simple and effective CTA. Develop a sense of urgency with the right call-to-action without being too pushy. However, convincing someone to take any action with a few simple words, is not an easy task, but with the right thought in your mind, and with a clear understanding of what you want them to do next, you can perfect this art.
Here are Five Super-cool techniques to write effective Call-to-Actions:
- Leave Them Curious
Believe me, it’s not rocket science. If you can effectively and mindfully leave them curious, they will definitely come back converting. You just have to wrap your head around and keep it simple. You are not evoking enough curiosity to make them hit the button. If that sounds right, go back to the drawing board — it needs to be redone. But, believe me, you can do it.
One awesome way is to tell people what you are selling and how it will help you. Leave them with the curiosity to know how it will work for you.
There could be two important elements of evoking curiosity — creating urgency & promising a reward. Creating a sense of urgency compels your audience to get it before the offer is gone and promise for a reward would leave them with curiosity to get the reward. And, when both of these elements are presented in your call-to-action, you can be sure of an improved click-through rate & enhanced conversion.
But, you’ve got honestly here. You cannot fool around your audience and not reward with something that you promised with your call-to-action. If you have promised a free e-book, make sure that it’s for real. You can use power words like Free, Bonus, Instantly, Because, You, and “New” to make your call-to-action more effective & curiosity evoking. Craft a call-to-action message in a way to bring about desire in your prospects on what’s there on the other end of the CTA.
- Repetition Works:
A human brain is all but inclined towards grasping something that repeats constantly. Take advantage of that form of the human brain’s wiring. Our brain is wired to seek out repetition. You may also use a term repetitively for effective call-to-action.
Like, for instance, if you want visitors to sign up for your newsletters. You must use the term, “free vacation to Italy” throughout the page. You can effectively use this through the body, header, and the final call to action. Skimming through the page, when the user reaches the final call-to-action, his brain has already accepted the subscription with a “free vacation to Italy.”
What if you are not very sure about the right phrase for this kind of repetition? In that case, you can turn around your targeted keyword. Why I suggest it because it would be a seamless beginning-to-end experience for the user. Let’s say your prospect types the keyword in the search engine, it appears in your meta description or an ad copy, and then when he finally reaches your call-to-action, finding the same keyword, his brain recognizes the keywords he searched for. With such repetitions and correlations, his brain will accept to subscribe.
- Use a free trial:
There are calls-to-action that you cannot help but click — one of which is, “free trial.” Most often this CTA is used by software as a service (SaaS) companies. Don’t hesitate to offer a free trial, there are other ways to convert these prospects later on, like through email marketing.
If you really want to convert these prospects, you have got to be guiding them through every step. You need to help them get rid of all the obstacles they might have been facing through the process of buying the product. Their mind is already flooded with questions, and they expect an answer from you.
According to a study, it has been found that 84% of all those prospects who were asked to buy a product in their first encounter bounced off from the site. On the other hand, the conversion was increased to over 328% when a free trial was offered. So, for a better lead generation, “free trial” call-to-action is an awesome idea. Of course there are other ways How to Enhance the Conversion Rate of Your Website – you can read our blog to know.
But once you have decided to use this CTA, it is important to find ways to retain these prospects or users even after their free trial expires. You have to figure out what would be the most suitable time frame for your free trial. Find out what will work best for you — a 14-day free trial or a 30-day free trial? Here the type of business you are in and the responsiveness of your customers will be the real deciding factor. You may gauge the usefulness of “free trial” CTA by the fact that even after having such a huge customer base many big brands like MOZ & Shopify use it.
- Focus on a Benefit:
Focusing on letting your prospects know the benefits they will get from the product will enhance conversion. Take for instance, what do you look for while browsing through a website where you have landed up searching for a product or a service?
I can bet upon, you were constantly trying to figure out, what is there for me? How will it benefit me? How will it make my life better?
Most new marketers make this mistake of focusing only on describing the product without letting prospects know, “how it is going to benefit them” and “how it is going to better their life.” Prospects convert when they get a clear answer for, what’s there for me? They want to know how your product is going to save time and money for them. You can smartly incorporate these aspects into your call-to-action to immediately answer their questions.
For instance, “save your hard-earned money” will look more attractive to your users than “read how to save money.” Get instant clicks with such calls-to-action.
Conclusion:
You can drive your business towards generating revenue by enhancing traffic and converting them. Conversion is possible through your sales copies, promotional banners, landing pages, and campaigns by using effective call-to-action. That is where clicks come up. You have got to go back to the driving board and test rework on copies, button designs, and CTA, no matter whether you are driving traffic from social media or search engines. However, there isn’t any rule that tells you how to write an effective call-to-action, but testing variations would work for sure.
Tell us in the comment box, what rules do you follow to write your call-to-action that can drive traffic?