One of the biggest mistakes many people make when designing, building and writing the words for their websites is to forget to add the all important “Calls to Action” (CTAs)
What is a Call to Action?
A call to action, or CTA, is something that encourages the reader/viewer/user of your content to actually DO something. On a website is usually in the form of a button, a graphic or just some text that is clickable and takes the visitor to the next stage in the sale (or conversion) process.
This leads to the next question….
Why do I need CTA’s on my website? After all everything’s there on the pages in my site for people to read and make their decision to call me.
Most people do a lot of reading these days and most people are extremely busy – the effect that this has is to force the reader on your website to either read faster or read less detail.
Which do you do? If you’re like the majority you will be reading less detail and looking for the highlighted words or buttons that are going to take you to what you need to find out more quickly.
Did you click on the Download button above? Were you a little bit disappointed that it didn’t do anything?
Your job as a business owner, and therefore a website owner, is to lead your potential customer to the information YOU WANT THEM TO READ as quickly as possible.
Then you need them to take action whether it be pick up the phone, subscribe to your mailing list, download your ebook or buy your product online.
There is a lot of psychology behind how to create effective calls to action, where to place calls to action and what colour to make your calls to action – so much that at first look it all appears quite baffling – but, if you haven’t already, the first step is to get started by putting a few on your site. If they work – great! If not – tweak them and try again.
What’s important is to try and measure the effect, for example if your CTA is “Sign up for my Newsletter” you can tell very easily how many have done so. Could a more effective CTA be “Drop me your email address to receive 101 money saving tips in your Inbox IMMEDIATELY”? Quite possibly.
Does it work better if the signup box is green? or red? You’ll have to try it and see!
How Can We help?
Our fully inclusive, pay monthly web design service makes it very easy for you to do all this. When we design your website (Silver or Gold package) you automatically get your website professionally copywritten – and this includes the most important calls to action, particularly on the homepage.
We also make sure that your visitor is led through the website so that they find it very easy to make the decision to get in touch with you.
When you want to test a new layout, a different colour or a different set of words in your calls to action all you have to do is email your request to us and we take care of it, usually within 2 working days. You don’t need to figure out how to do it – we do all the techy bits!
For more information please take a look at our Websites page.
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