Is Your Call To Action Hurting Your CTR?

Your call to action is a sentence, a phrase, or even a single word: how much impact could it possibly have on your website? Sometimes, it’s the littlest things that mean the most.  Does your CTA give you a good ROI or is it negatively impacting your CTR?  Don’t worry: there’s no more acronyms, only some tips to help you improve your call to action.

Buy Now!

Buy Now, Click Here, Submit. These are all incredibly generic CTAs, and they’re not doing much for you. They’re taking up valuable screen real estate that you could be putting to better use. Buy now and Click Here. Why? What’s in it for me? Submit. Are they asking me to surrender? Surrender my credit card numbers? No way.

Sometimes, CTAs are unclear. A visitor to your page might be unsure what clicking through will do; will they have to fill out a form? Are they going to be directed to another site? Are they signing up for something? Are they downloading something?  Other times, the problem can be the wording that turns people off.  Conducting A/B testing can help you pinpoint what’s going wrong with your CTA. To fix it, try:

• Making your CTA very clear and noticeable. The button itself should be sizeable; it shouldn’t overwhelm your other design elements, but it should be immediately visible. No one is going to go looking for your call to action.
• Have one call to action per page. What is the goal of this page? What do you want people to do?  It can be confusing to users if there are multiple CTAs. Another problem you run into is that they may opt to click through on the one that is less important to your business.
• What if you have to have two options? For instance, many sites offer a free trial or the option to purchase.  If this is the case, put the most important one (to you!) in a color that contrasts with the background to make it more noticeable. The second one could be in a lighter or darker shade of the background color. It is very visible but it pops out less.
• Make sure the CTA button and font are noticeable and legible.
• Encourage your visitors to act immediately by creating a sense of urgency: “Book your tickets now!” or “Sign up and get started today.”
• Give visitors the information they need.  Basecamp’s CTA does this while remaining short and sweet.  In bigger letters, it reads “See Plans and Pricing.” Beneath that in slightly smaller letters is, “30-day free trial, sign up in 60 seconds.” Do this when it will add value or convenience to the user.

Is your call to action failing to make people act?  Try tightening up your language and presentation to see if your CTR improves.