Your website is a powerful engagement and conversion tool that can help you gain customers, increase revenues, and increase brand visibility.
If it is not driving engagement, clicks, and conversion, it becomes an ineffective tool, especially for your marketing and lead generation campaigns. One of the reasons this happens is poorly designed call-to-action buttons.
If you are experiencing low conversion rates, it is a good idea to check your call-to-action buttons and A/B test them to see which changes you need to make to improve your metrics. As you do so, here are some things that can help.
Make Your Call-To-Action Buttons Stand Out
If your landing page contains a lot of text, it is easy for your call-to-action button to get lost and not be seen by visitors if it does not stand out. This happens when designers use colours that match the website’s theme, leading to them blending in instead of standing out.
To remedy this, consider using bright and contrasting colours. Many people are drawn to nature, so a colour like forest green on a website that uses red, orange, or other contrasting colours can be a great option.
You can directly copy the forest-green colour code and apply it in your CSS to make your call-to-action buttons stand out if you are not using green as your primary website or brand colour.
If your website already uses shades of green, the orange or red background colours will stand out. When you use these colours for the background, use a white font for the button’s text. White will stand out a lot more and provide enough contrast for the visually impaired.
Start Your Calls To Action With Strong Verbs
Understanding that a call-to-action button aims to get people to take action, check whether those on your website are using strong verbs.
People are more likely to take action if they tell them to, so strong verbs that provide such directions will work much better than weak verbs.
For example, strong verbs like buy, book, order, subscribe, or download tell your visitors exactly what they should do, which makes them more likely to click the button to complete those actions.
Tap Into Emotional Copywriting
In addition to using strong verbs, you should also understand how to leverage people’s emotions to get them to take the actions you want them to. Let’s look at a call-to-action button for a travel agency.
A button that says, “plan your dream vacation” is more likely to stir up emotions and mental images of what it will be like to book a vacation through the agency rather than “talk to our agent” The latter implies the visitor has to go through someone to get what they want, something many people do not want in the age of frictionless and quick services.
Importantly, know when to use strong punctuation. An exclamation mark can stir up excitement, while a question mark can make people click a button to see the answer. The latter is great if you are providing a solution or resource that fulfils a strong need or want.
Touch On The Benefits
Most people want to know what benefits they get from clicking your button, leaving their email address, or taking any other action on your website. Instead of hiding it in a long wall of text, put the benefit title there on the button.
A great phrase that would work on a landing page selling financial services is “Click here to start building wealth today”. It tells the visitor what to do and the benefit they get when they do.
Test Your Calls To Action
Every savvy marketer knows they can squeeze a little more out of their copy. Business owners can do the same from their calls to action. A/B tests are an incredibly useful way for business owners and marketers to see which calls-to-action button elements bring them the most clicks.
To start the test, they can change things like the phrase, background colour, or font size to see which button captures people’s attention and gets them to click.
They can then discard the other less-performing version.
Successful A/B tests require a control, the version you start with, and the version you are testing against. Both can be equally strong, but one will ultimately win.
A strong call-to-action button can make a huge difference in your engagement and conversion rates, directly impacting your marketing results, revenues, customer acquisition and more.
You should learn what works and what does not, plus how to prove either way, to ensure the call-to-action buttons are the best they can be.
