Call to action, what is it and how do you use it effectively?
What’s a website visitor worth if they don’t take any (inter)action on your website? In most cases, unfortunately, not very much.
Prompting website visitors to take action is a fundamental goal of almost every website or shop. The marketing term for prompting action is ‘call to action’, or CTA for short. With a call to action you invite people to perform an action on your site. This could be signing up for your newsletter, downloading brochures, reading information on a page, making a purchase in your webshop, or another action you place a lot of value on.
Call to action in advertising
A dull, flat call to action isn’t of this era, and usually isn’t effective either. So try to use a call to action in your ads to tap into your target audience’s emotions, because that’s what sells! Research in the field of neuromarketing shows that a purchase decision is generated from the primitive part of your brain. This part is responsible for your feelings and emotions — the most important factors in the purchase process. Business Insider wrote a good article about this. A good call to action strikes a chord with people, immediately grabbing their attention. You can tap into your target audience’s emotions, for instance, by asking a question in the headline of your ad. You then place the call to take action. A small example:
Testing, testing and even more testing
Prompting action is one thing. But optimising it is a whole different story. In online marketing terms, we call a completed action a conversion. The total number of visitors to your page relative to the number of conversions is called the conversion rate or conversion percentage (CTR). So how do you make sure your conversion percentage is as high as possible? Very simple: testing, testing and even more testing! Everything hinges on testing your choices. Fortunately, there are countless ways to test.
Call to action in Adwords
You can experiment with your ad CTAs in Adwords. Write several different calls to action in the headlines of your ad. Try to tap into emotion and, alongside that, also write a plain text version, for instance. Play with the angle of your call and formulate around 3-4 different ad texts in your ad group. After your campaign goes live, Google determines which ad text performs best based on click behaviour. This is one of the many ways to optimise your ads.
Call to action buttons on your website
Besides a call to action in your ads, you almost certainly also have CTAs on your product or service page. After all, you want visitors to purchase your product or service. The question then is where’s the best place to put this call to action. Do you put it above or below the fold of your website? What colour should the button be for optimal results? Should I leave white space around my CTA or not? All very legitimate questions. This kind of difference can, after all, have a big impact on your conversion rate.
Google Optimize is a free tool you can use to measure (conversion) results. You can run various tests, such as different layouts of your site or the locations, colour, size or text of your CTA buttons. Google Optimize offers more possibilities than just A/B testing, namely:
• Multivariate testing
• Redirect/split run
• Setting goals from Google Analytics
• Targeting based on geographic and usage characteristics
Say you want to know whether a red CTA button works better than a blue button. During an A/B test (with, for example, Google Optimize) you essentially split your website traffic and route 50% of your traffic past a page version with a red button and 50% past the blue button. After some time you’ll notice that one generates more action than the other. At that point you can make an informed decision to make your button red or blue.
Get in touch with us!
Do you struggle to get people to take action on your website or webshop? Or would you like to explore the possibilities of optimising your conversion rate? Get in touch with one of our online marketing consultants to explore the possibilities for your situation.