Tips for Creating Better Calls to Action

Good calls to action use verbal (sale) and visual (click icon) cues.

We recently posted an article about determining your target audience and calls to action before you begin a new website design. Calls to action are buttons, forms, downloads, videos, or other desired actions you want site visitors to do while they are on your site. When a visitor completes a call to action, we call that visit a conversion.

In internet marketing, each call to action is measured as a tracked goal and recorded on your website’s analytics. By defining and tracking calls to actions we learn which marketing campaigns are best generating conversions. This data provides insights for improving the campaign and increasing ROI.

This article is going to look at a few current online advertisements and use them as context to highlight some tips for creating better calls to action. 

Layout and Design

Your call to action needs to stand out from the rest of the advertisement. The two main methods of accomplishing this are by surrounding the call to action with negative space and varying the color. A quick Google of the phrase ‘Verizon iPhone” links to a page with this ad:

Notice that Verizon separates the “Order Now” button visually by making it the only red item on the page and giving it is own space at the bottom. We’d like to see that order button a little larger but overall, this is a good call to action. Let’s check out a better one.

Explain the Benefits and Provide Social Proof

In order to sell, your product must address a potential customer’s needs. To do this, you must explicitly describe the benefits of your product or service. You can make a simple list or you can take a step further and provide social proof by showing that other people endorse the product. Here’s an ad for Barnes & Noble’s Nook Color that displayed after Googling “eReaders”:

This advertisement has the negative space and unique coloring necessary to make the call to action stand out but it also lists benefits and provides social proof in the form of a Facebook like button. 24,000 people can’t be wrong, can they?

Another form of social proof is to display logos of well-known companies who use your product as seen in this ad for Microsoft’s new cloud offering, Windows Azure:

The message here is that if Azure is good enough for the likes of 3M, NASA, and General Mills, it deserves your consideration. They even include the ultimate call to action, free and provide links for more information, brilliant!

Create Urgency & Offer Incentives

Big surprise here: consumers don’t like to part with their money. If they think that your well-priced offer is going to be around for awhile, they will bookmark it and then scour the web for a better price.

Take a look at Godaddy.com’s price for registering domain names. If you go straight to their website’s, you see their full price for .com domain registration ($11.95). But, if you enter their site by clicking a PPC ad, you get one of two special offers:

Why would they offer three different prices? Simple: they are trying to provide incentive to new customers to sign-up. If you are already a Godaddy customer, you go to the front page and you use what you know (and pay almost two times the price!).

But if you are a new customer, chances are that you are comparing prices. Godaddy’s special price could make the difference and make you sign-up.

What’s more – this is a limited time offer. Either you sign-up soon or you lose the change to buy domains at this great price.

A Few More Tips

Pingdom.com’s front page illustrates some other principles for creating effective calls to action:

• Keep it simple – Don’t overburden the visitor with too many offers or too much information. Make it easy for visitors to scan your offer and find the important bits.
• Offer secondary options – Having multiple price levels and entry points allows customers to try your service.
• Avert risk – Pingdom does it twice. They reassure everyone by offering a 30-day risk-free trial for their Business or Basic plans as well as offering a fully functioning Free account that only works for one website.

In Conclusion

Good advertising is the same whether on a billboard or a website. You want to target your message to the right audience, prove to them you can address a need of theirs, and provide incentives to encourage the sale. You want your message to be short and sweet yet still provide the necessary information to drive a well-informed sale.

Lastly, we would be remiss if we didn’t mention the common mantra of creating effective calls to action. You must test, test, test. Alter Imaging uses tools like Google’s Website Optimizer to serve different calls to actions to different visitors. Then we use that data to see which version createed more conversions. None of the examples listed above just appeared. They were designed and tested by internet marketers to make them as effective as possible…and chances are they are still being tested and redesigned even now.

Contact Alter Imaging today to see how we can improve your web sales with effective calls to action.