Calls To Action Will Boost Conversions, Traffic and Interaction – Improve Yours Now

Gone are the days of flashing images and brightly coloured titling – it’s 2014 and words make up the web. Good content should be at the core of every professional site, but in a startling majority of cases it’s merely an afterthought to the more expensive and laborious web-design process. Finely crafted copy, it seems, is less important than attractive visuals.

Of course we’re getting it the wrong way round; if we spent more time working on content in tandem with appealing web design, then we’d notice a marked increase in both traffic and conversions over time.

Calls to Action
Put simply, a call to action (CTA) is a small section of copy that instructs the consumer to do something. The most common examples are found on e-commerce websites, telling consumers to “Buy Now” or “Add to Basket” for example. There are however a multitude of cases in which sales aren’t the final objective; you might want to get people to visit a blog, for example, or subscribe to a weekly newsletter.

The design of your calls to action will have a drastic impact on how successfully your site functions, so you should spend a lot of time trying to get them right. Bear in mind, however, that the two defining aspects of a CTA are concision and imperative wording.

Trial and Error
As with any copywriting, finding the right combination and order of words can be a lengthy process, but the following case study should convince you that it is all worthwhile in the end.

Social media marketing guru Dustin Curtis recently performed a simple AB test to examine the effects of slightly changing the CTAs on your site. An AB test, sometimes referred to as a split test, is a common way of working out how successful web site changes are. Web designers basically use JavaScript to set up two different web pages which relate to the same topic, then measure which page is more successful in its aims. This can be done very easily using services such as Optimizely and Google Website Optimiser.

By changing his call to action from “Follow on Twitter” to “You should follow me on Twitter here” Dustin increased his current Twitter following by 173%.

This doesn’t only reiterate the importance of split testing, but demonstrates just how effective seemingly minute chances can be. As trends continue to show, web users orient towards content that is slightly informal and more personal, hence why the direct address in the second CTA proved so successful.

Avoiding the Generic
Avoiding repetitive CTAs such as “Buy Now” and “Like on Facebook” can be a good way to stand out amongst competitors and therefore increase conversions. This is never more apparent than in the case of GitHub and their website’s “Contact a human” button. This CTA is found on their FAQ pages, and stands out because of the fact it humorously points out how anonymous some websites can be. That, and its unusual wording.

In Short

• It is important to devote more time, effort and funding to good content rather than just enticing visuals.
• Successful calls to action rely on brevity and strong imperative wording.
• Having CTA’s that avoid generic expressions such as “Sign Up” will make you stand out and give your site a more appealing, personal touch.
• Time spent testing different CTA’s is not time wasted; arriving at the right wording now will increase your website’s success in the future.