9 Call to Action Best Practices

When determining the best marketing strategy for your business, it is essential that you take a close look at your calls to action. The call to action, or CTA, could be considered the most important part of your copy. It is the part that motivates potential customers to take action (buy, sign up, visit a page, etc.) while providing them with the necessary steps for what to do next. 

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For this reason, creating a powerful and memorable CTA for your web copy and sales copy is vital to your company’s overall success. Keep reading to learn more about CTA best practices that will improve your marketing strategy and help you convert leads more effectively. 

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Keep Your CTAs Brief

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If your CTAs seem to go on and on, then it is time to cut them down. When you add too much unnecessary detail to your CTA with the intention of sounding knowledgeable or clever, the result is a wordy mess that confuses and disinterests your target audience. 

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If possible, always keep your CTAs on the shorter side (two to four words). A simple and brief call to action can be a generic statement such as “join for free,” “get started today,” or “learn more.” All a CTA needs to do is encourage the user to continue investing in your company. You can show off your unique brand personality, but there is no need for it to be overly elaborate.

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Create Urgency

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Your CTAs need to invoke a sense of urgency in the potential customer that convinces them to take action right away, not at a later point. Creating this urgency can be done by making your products seem limited or the customer’s problem seem pressing. 

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Creating real or implied urgency has been shown to increase conversions by more than 100% in some cases. To create urgency, use offers and phrases like “buy today,” “sale ends tomorrow,” “reserve your spot now,” “last chance,” “limited time offer,” etc.

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Try Reverse Psychology

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By using reverse psychology for your CTA, you are essentially putting the potential customer in a position where they have to think more deeply about their needs and wants. Here’s an example: If you go to a weekly grocery delivery website and get a pop-up that says: “Do you want to prioritize your health while loving your meals?”, there might be two different buttons. One says “Yes, I’m ready to love my food and fuel my body,” and the other says “No, I’m happy with my health and my food plan.” 

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Either answer is fine, but it makes customers pause for a moment before they click “No,” as they consider if they truly are satisfied with their current situation. This encourages the user to stop and think about what they are doing before taking definitive action.

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Personalize Your CTAs

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You never want your company’s CTAs to feel too generalized. You want to make sure that each user feels like they’re being spoken to directly. Using your data on customers and leads to make slight changes to the wording of CTAs and tailoring them to your target audience can be a game-changer.

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Some factors that you can consider are the user’s location, their age/generation, if they are a first-time user, or any other factor that seems relevant without being too personal. It has been reported that personalizing CTAs can boost your company’s visitor-to-lead conversion rate by 42%.

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Use Responsive Design

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Remember that not all of your users will be looking at your website on a desktop device. In fact, in 2020, 68% of all website visits globally were done on a mobile device. Before you publish a CTA, look closely at its placement and appearance on different screen sizes and software platforms. Ideally, your CTA should be high on the page and in the middle column.

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Utilize Contrasting Colors and White Space

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Simply put, more people are likely to pay attention to your CTA if it is appealing to look at. For this reason, you should utilize contrasting colors and white space in order to draw the user’s eye to the CTA as soon as they land on your page. 

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Your CTA should always stand out against everything else that is available on the page. It should be a different color than the rest of the text on your page, and bigger than the surrounding text as well. Use white space around it so that users do not get distracted from the CTA, but rather focus on it as soon as they see your page.

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Make Your CTAs Into a Button

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CTAs don’t need to be designed in one specific way, but clickable buttons are one of the most effective ways to format them. The human brain is wired to expect action when they click a button, and it’s always tempting to see what happens on the other side of a button push! 

On a serious note, when you create CTA buttons, you should ensure that they’re always easy to find and that they are logically placed at the top of your webpage, right after some inspiring web copy, after a product listing, etc.

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Double-Check Your Landing Pages

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A CTA doesn’t have any purpose if the user clicks on it and is directed to a broken page or a website graveyard, so always be sure to double-check that your landing pages are functioning properly and up to date on all platforms and devices. Once you have completed the creation of your website and CTAs, go through everything and test it out to ensure that customers will not be left empty-handed. 

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Test and Refine

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Your CTA probably won’t be perfect the first time around, and that’s okay. Creating impactful CTAs is a process, and you should accept that it will most likely take a few rounds of A/B testing to understand what works for your business. 

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The Bottom Line...

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If you want to learn more about CTAs and boosting your conversion rates, the experts at Madak are here to help you refine your marketing strategy. Connect with us here and in the meantime, follow the tips above and get testing!