The call to action (CTA) is the single most important element of any lead capture page or any other kind of promotional content. If your landing page is getting a lot of traffic, but at the same time is failing to convert, the problem may lie within the CTA. Perhaps it’s not easily noticeable or it makes people suspicious and turn away. Whatever the reason, you’ll need to take every step to make your CTA irresistible.
#1. Use Active Language
A great CTA should instil a sense of urgency, albeit without sounding so hyperbolic to the extent it turns warier visitors off. Most importantly, you should always use active language by starting any CTA with an imperative, such as ‘subscribe,’ ‘buy,’ or ‘call’. You can further convey a sense of urgency by including a phrase pointing to a special time-limited promotion, though you should take care to avoid some of the more common advertising clichés.
#2. Provide Directions
Generating leads and sales relies heavily on making things easier for your target customer. After all, people usually turn to the Internet to save time and effort when they want to buy a new product or service. As such, you should clearly guide them through the purchase process, and this means using your CTA to direct your potential customer towards completing the desired action. In other words, a CTA is not just meant to be promotional in nature – it also needs to be helpful.
#3. Enhance Visibility
No one should ever have to scroll down the page to see the CTA and, if they do, there’s a good chance they’ll never notice it. Web users have notoriously short attention spans, particularly when using the frustratingly small screens and virtual keyboards of mobile devices. You should always keep your CTA above the fold so it will be one of the first things that both mobile and desktop users see. On a similar note, always use bright colours and large text to draw attention to it. Just make sure to avoid annoying features like flashing buttons and other distractions.
#4. Highlight a Benefit
Consumers tend to take action when they can see a genuine, plausible and benefit-driven CTA. Being surrounded by spam, it shouldn’t come as any surprise that consumers are warier and less patient and forgiving than ever before. While using active, urgent language is crucial for making that sale or generating that lead, it’s also advisable for your CTA to highlight a key benefit. As such, you should consider accompanying your CTA with the key benefit of acting upon it.
#5. Keep It Short
Active language and benefit-driven highlights quickly get lost if the content is too long, and this is doubly true of CTAs. A CTA should typically be no more than about five words long, although there’s no harm in accompanying it with another short sentence highlighting a benefit, as mentioned previously. Nonetheless, the CTA itself must be short and concise the point that it has no chance of being skipped or causing confusion.
Final Words
A persuasive CTA might take some creativity and effort to get right, but it can make or break the effectiveness of any landing page or other promotional content. Coming up with great CTAs is often challenging, since you have very little space to work with. However, you also need to be able to get your message across and provide something compelling enough for people to click on. Nonetheless, practice and experimentation lead to perfection, and with some perseverance, you should be able to find something that works for your particular audience.
