The call to action has always been an important part of marketing, and that importance is amplified online. Getting a potential customer to visit your site is the first step, but the real value comes in motivating that potential customer to engage your business more directly. Landing pages are prime locations for CTAs, because they’re designed to showcase the offer in your CTA. There’s also a good chance that a CTA led the shopper to the landing page in the first place.

The best CTAs motivate your prospect to take an action that might lead to a sale by offering something of value in return. You’ll often be asking prospects to provide contact information in exchange for a special deal, high-level content, or a similar incentive. The offer needs to be attractive, of course, but the words you choose for your CTA play a huge role in how the prospect perceives your offer and whether they take you up on it.

Emphasize Design has the content development expertise necessary to develop effective CTAs for every situation.

Create a Call to Action that Motivates and Stimulates

When creating a CTA, the key points of focus are language, appearance, and the offer you make. Your CTA should stand out from the rest of the page, so bolder, larger text and link buttons work well. Use simple, positive language that gets the reader excited about clicking through, and always put your offer in clear terms. You want to be enthusiastic, without exaggerating the offer.

• Copy that implies value and inspires action is the most successful in earning a click. Instead of Submit, try words like Download, Discover, Explore, Learn, Find and Examine so that users feel like they are being rewarded for their effort.
• Keep your CTAs at the top of the page if you can, and make them big, bold, robust and dimensional. Contrasting colours work well to draw the user’s eye.
• Your CTA needs to relate somehow to the page that it’s on. Blog posts and landing pages often feature targeted content on specific topics, making them the perfect locations for CTAs.
• CTAs work really well with A/B testing, and testing is one of the keys to consistent results. A/B testing is a way to compare marketing variables in order to determine which one gets a better response. In this case, you’ll be testing one CTA against another.
• Analytics go hand-in-hand with testing your CTAs. In addition to shedding light on which CTAs work and which don’t, analytics will also help you select the best pages to place your CTAs. If a page is earning a lot of traffic compared to the rest of your site, that page will probably be a good location for some form of CTA.
• Use familiar language, and always make the benefits of your offer as clear as possible. The CTA itself should be brief, but you can explain the offer in the surrounding content.
• Whatever you offer, make sure it has real value for your prospects. Web users are savvy, and they can usually tell when someone is trying to get their contact information with a less-than-stellar offer.
• An offer doesn’t have to be high in monetary value for it to be effective. Offering content that provides real expertise on a relevant topic is a great way to earn clicks on your CTAs.

Need help crafting CTAs that move your prospects to action? Emphasize Design has you covered at every step, and we know how to craft offers that get the attention of your prospects. CTAs are one of the most important elements of Internet marketing for your Calgary business, and we’ll help you incorporate them effectively and seamlessly into your web design.