What is a Call To Action? How to create a killer CTA button?

Getting potential customers to do what you want them to do is no more than herding cat. They leave shopping carts before checking out, they do not sign up for appealing promotion campaigns, and even they do not have the intention to read your blogs all the way to end.

But a solution is there! To lead your prospects to your direction, all you need to do is include a compelling call to action on your website. Using CTA buttons is not new to businesses; however, understanding it from inside out is possibly new to everyone.

In today’s post, I am going to show you different types of CTA and the formula to make an outstanding CTA significantly driving your sales. So now, grab a coffee, a pen, a piece of paper, and get ready for the deluge of conversion you are about to experience.

Table of content

• What is a call to action
• Call to action words and phrases
• Why does a CTA matter?
• Categorizing your CTAs
  • Functions
  • Designs
• How to create a perfect CTA
  • Visibility
  • Clickability
  • Positioning
  • Copywriting
• Final thoughts

What is Call To Action?

Basically, a call to action is a statement designed to encourage the audience to take some sort of immediate response on your website when reading or hearing it. In business, it is considered as part of marketing strategies to get your target market to respond by taking action.

CTA can be positioned at the end or sometimes throughout a sales pitch to lead potential customers in the right direction and let them know what to do next if they are already interested in your offer.

CTA can drive a variety of different actions according to the content’s goal. Here are a few different actions a visitor can get called to carry out:

• Sign up: for inviting customers to sign up for a free trial, an online course, a future event, or a product.

• Subscribe: rather than push customers to purchase; a CTA invites them to receive updates from the business, such as blogs, promotion campaigns, etc.

• Get started: to drive a variety of behaviors for a company, from a free trial to virtual reality experience.}

• Learn more: to provide potential clients with further information about your product, so they are prepared to buy it.

• Try for free: allow the users to demo a product before deciding to buy it or not.

For many new businesses, they do not implement CTA in their marketing and sales pitches because of the following reasons:

• The assumption that prospect already knows what to do next if they want to buy or learn more
• Concerns that potential customer will be interrupted by CTA Whatever the reason, leaving CTA out of marketing strategies is like accepting to lose prospects and money. Again, a CAT is precisely a powerful tool to seamlessly assist customers in their shopping journey and covert more sales.

Call to action words and phrases

There is a wide range of words and phrases that can be used to create an impressive call to action, however, action verbs such as Signup, Register, Call, Subscribe, Buy, Donate, Order, Share, Follow, Download, Click here for, etc., are always prioritized.

One of the most useful psychological tactics to get people to take action instantly is to add a sense of urgency and a fear of missing out. For example:

• Buy now before supplies run out
• Limited quantities available!
• Offer expires on Christmas
• Reserve your spot now!

Why does a CTA matter?

As we already mentioned, having a strategic CTA can help you increase your revenue while also expanding your customer base. But it not always enough to know its effects on the surface like that. We need to see dig depth into the actual case to get an idea of how a CTA can do for businesses.

Firstly, it helps to capture a web user’s attention within a second.

Because most visitors stick around less than 59 seconds, determining what’s worth paying attention to. Without a right CA, you will lose a chance to keep them stay longer. Conversely, a right message combined with the proper movement on your website at the right time is vital for breaking people out of their browsing trance and getting them to take action. Secondly, it helps to target and convert online users based on their intent.

Secondly, it helps to target and convert online users based on their intent.

Targeting and converting by intent is the use of relevant CTA to meet an end-user or prospect’s intent, which is what they really want or need at that moment. When placing a CTA to do such as a job, there are a few factors that need to be taken into account:

• Who they are
• The content of the page a visitor is on
• Where are they coming from
• What intent is indicated by their behavior on your website

Let’s take an example. If an online visitor has read a significant portion of your blog and they are not already an email subscriber, via a CTA, you can offer them an opportunity to become a subscriber by engaging them with premium content.

Or, if a potential customer is on your pricing section for more than a few seconds and has not taken action yet, engage them will a CAT to chat with your team. By this, you can clear out their doubt and help them get started.

Thirdly, beyond intent targeting, a CTA also targets people on your website based on what stage of your funnel they are in.

The below screenshot may demonstrate how effectively a CTA can move potential clients further down to the sale funnel.

Whenever the CTA is located, you can flexibly use them in your funnel to:

• Engage and educate leads in your products
• Guide returning leads to content and offers, converting them into customers
• Upsell existing customers and encourage repeat purchase

In a nutshell, with the right CTA, you can create personalized flows for your visitors that retarget them with the next step and automate which CTAs people see as they progress through your funnel.

Categorizing your CTAs

There are serval ways to sort out CTAs’ type. Now, we will divide them into small groups based on their primary function and design.

Functions

Content boosting

As the name suggests, this kind of CTA is typically used to promote the content at the top of the funnel. When someone visits your website for the first time, your target is to pull them in, get them to explore, then convert them into a lead, and capture their contact for further marketing.

Actually, they are not leads yet. But they will be after they are convinced by your excellent CTA and your brilliant content.

Conversion generating

Conversion generating CTAs target customers in the middle or button of the funnel. They are specially designed to turn currents prospects into leads and then into customers.

A great example of this type in your landing page is the button “Download Now”.

Business centered

Unlike the two types above, Business-centered CTAs that are more self-promotional in nature. They can be for event promotion, webinar, social sharing- something of your business that you really want to promote. Also, that might not necessarily relate to the content of the page on which it is located.

Designs

Exit-intent

This type of CTA is perfect for keeping online users on your website when they are about to leave and go somewhere else.

Whenever the exit-intent technology senses someone is going to exist out of your website, the popup will be presented with some kinds of offers reasoning why they should leave and should hand over their information instead.

Inline/after-post

If the web users already read through your post, an inline or after post will appear at the end of that content, asking for customer’s contact, coming along with your offer.

If you already have loyal readers, this type of CTA is especially useful because it does not interrupt their viewing experience yet still drawing their attention.

Floating bar

Known as a ribbon or header/footer bar, a floating bar popup floats above or below content, making sure that user experience will not be blocked but still remain visible as users scroll through content.

However, the floating bar CTA is so subtle that users may not notice or recognize it’s there.

Slide-in

This kind of popup can be seen typically at the bottom left or right corners of the webpage. Slide-in CTA helps to convincing users to further engage with your brand by suggesting relevant pieces of content.

Sidebar

As the name suggests, this popup appears right in the sidebar for easy access. Although Sidebar CTA is non-threating to readers, sometimes, it is so subtle that they don’t even realize it’s there.

How to create a perfect CTA

When creating your first CTA, it is easy to get all turned around and come up with something that people will not click on. To help you save a considerable amount of time and effort, we are about to provide you a checklist for the essential elements of a crazily effective CTA.

Visibility

For visitors to click on your CTA, they have to notice its existence first. Hence, it must be eye-catching and easy to spot from the very first-moment users land on your page. Ideally, the color of CTA should contrast with the website design, and its size should be large enough to be noticed and perfectly aligned with the proportions of the other elements.

From our experience, a call to action will perform best around 225px wide and 45x high

Clickability

When it comes to visibility, the key element of CTA is its color. So what matters when concerning clickability?

We have found that most of the buttons that users click online follow these elements:

• Clear color contrast
• Distinctive button
• Surrounding white space
• Rectangular shape
• Supportive border line

Because every element and text on your website needs to lead your users to click to the CTA button, it is so essential to make it outshine, not dim it along the rest of your content. Make sure that you get rid of all the distractions around CTAs and focus on making them clickable.

Here are a typical example for you to check

Positioning

For the first time, when online users land on your page, they do not go deep down to anything. Instead, they will look for something that catches their attention. Consequently, you should place your CTAs in sections where visitors can spot them easily, which not only helps you gain more clicks but also keeps visitors stay on your page longer.

The most common scanning patterns are the “F” and “Z,” you can position your CTA according to such content organizations.

However, depending on certain purposes, we can flexibly change the position of CTA.

For example, if you are trying to sell a complicated solution, and the potential customers must digest and understand some information before making decisions, possibly, the button below the folder will bring positive results.

Copywriting

One of the most critical requirements of a CTA is that you have to offer a convincing copy of why users should click in the first place. If they are not convinced by the benefits that you provide, they will ignore your CTA.

We have found that some of the most clickable buttons are usually associated with power words to increase the click rate. These kinds of words are used to trigger the audience’s feelings. You can check the list here.

Besides, your CTA should be neither too long nor too short. If it is long and heavy to read, you may lose customers before they even decide whether to click on the button or not. If it is too short, perhaps your message is not conveyed at all. Therefore, keep your CTA short enough and worth to read.

What matters here is that your CTA must be relevant to the user needs. In your action button copy, you need to be very clear about what customers can get by clicking it.

Final thoughts

In conclusion, Call To Action buttons are powerful tools that bring more lead to your sales funnel.

We may say that it is not complicated to create killer CTAs. Keep in mind your user’s problems and solutions that make your buttons stand out by applying the suggested rules above. Let’s put the basics into practice and boost your conversion rate now!

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