How To Create An Enticing Call-To-Action

You are doing the biggest mistake if you are just putting efforts to attract visitors to your website, and limit yourself to that. In order to convert the visitors, you need strong, eye-catchy calls-to-action (CTA).

In fact, CTA’s turn your website into a dynamic digital marketing asset instead of just a stationary thing that is doing nothing, but unnecessarily occupying space.

You need clicks to transform a stranger into a potential customer of your website. In order to win the visitors’ trust, they should be given some valuable offer in exchange to respond to the CTA. The response could be in the form of clicking a link, or filling up a form. However, what exactly is a call-to-action? How are you able to create one? Where should it be placed?

This post is created to answer all your questions pertaining to Calls-to-action and how you could create one to enhance the performance of your landing page to get the maximum response rate from your visitors.

What exactly is a Call-to-Action?

In simple terms, Call-to-action that is abbreviated as CTA could be any image or line of text that asks the visitors, leads, or customers to take an action. Through various buttons, or texts you are in fact calling out your prospects to take your desired action.

The action that you are requesting the people to take could be anything from downloading an ebook, signing up for a webinar, attend an industry event, take part in a contest, or get a gift coupon. A CTA could be conveniently placed in your marketing from a landing page, to ebook, or your blog post.

I have given the instance of Mountain Dew over here. Have a look at the call-to-action circled in red.

The moment you roll-over your mouse on the CTA, it turns to something like this:

CTA’s do play a major role in attracting the audience if used in the right way.

If you thought that you could just get started with the CTA by adding the dull “Click Here” message on a neon button, and insert it on your website expecting large number of visitors coming in, you need to rethink your tactics. There are many critical elements that you need to include into your CTA if you want to grab the attention of your visitors.

Checklist When Creating An Effective Call-to-Action

# 1 – Pre-determine What You Want Your Visitors To Do

You should know what you are aiming beforehand. Are you calling out your prospects to sign up for a newsletter, or download an eBook, or to visit a blog? This will help you in crafting the CTA on the page.

# 2 – Be clear and concise

Be very clear in asking your visitor to do your determined thing. Don’t make it complicated with a flowery language. Just be straight-forward.

# 3 – If necessary, be repetitive

Don’t let the purpose of the call-to-action lose its way. If there is a long sales page explaining the benefits of an eBook that the visitor could download, make sure you insert a call-to-action at various points of the page, though you need to draw a line so that it doesn’t look spammy.

3 Times repetition of the same CTA through a long-form landing page

# 4 – Give them instructions

Your duty doesn’t end by just telling them what to do. Tell them how to do, especially if it is not clear at once. The link should be highlighted clearly that states that the visitor needs to click, the form should be there with clear instructions for various fields, or the button that you want them to click on should be clear and attractive to grab attention.

# 5 – Don’t have internal competition of CTAs

Don’t let the main CTA go unnoticed with a number of CTAs on the same page. It’s a good practice to have fewer distractions that would let them stay on the same page and follow your instructions. You don’t want their eyes to wander to the sidebar and follow an advertisement that leads to another website.

# 6 – Use a strongly commanding verb for the CTA

Very quickly and clearly sum up what subscribers need to do and what they will get. Some examples are:

• Download now • Buy Now • Subscribe Today

# 7 – Add A Sense Of Urgency

The CTA should sound urgent. The offer should be made available for a limited time and tell the visitors to take the action now. This helps in motivating a more immediate response.

In this group of CTAs you can see how having a term to create urgency – ‘now’, ’30 days’ – can help to give a sense of urgency that not the rest of CTAs here collected achieve to express. Choosing the right CTA can it be as tricky as determining what elements to include your main landing page, but it worth its time.

# 8 – Use highly contrasting colors as compared to the surroundings

You could perform A/B testing for your CTA’s, wherein you test different versions of your CTA to determine with version has been able to get more response. Using different colors will give an idea on which colored button has been able to catch attention of the audience.

# 9 – Have distinguished Call-to-action

The Calls-to-action shouldn’t be a hit-and-miss. They should be well distinguished so that the visitors could make out between pure text and the link, or button that they need to click on.

# 10 – Get In the Right Position

One more important factor is the position of the call-to-action on your page. The ideal place is at the top of the page in the central column.

This picture rightly shows how a CTA could be placed to grab attention right at the start of the page, where the page suggests the visitors to get a quote for their accidental insurance.

# Bonus Ball: Deliver the promise

Finally, make sure that the visitor gets what you have promised to them. The upcoming process also needs to be thoroughly thought as the call-to-action.

Conclusion

An effective call-to-action is the key-player in the success of your online marketing and it should be give importance just like the other elements of the page in terms of creative visual design, usability, and powerful copy-writing.

You could expect a handsome ROI if you are doing it correctly.