Small Business Marketing Tips: Make your Call-to-Action (CTA) Work for you and Close the Sale

We have all run across CTAs on the web, in emails, and even social media. You know those bits of hyperlinked text or buttons that tell you to "take action." When you create your small business website, it's important to keep in mind what a CTA is meant to do and how to track your results. CTAs should be visually attractive, action oriented, and easy to locate on your pages and emails.

What are CTAs?

On your website, a Call-to-Action (CTA) is a short phrase, clickable text, image, or button that prompts your web visitors to take immediate action. CTAs can lead web visitors to register for an event, subscribe to a service, download a piece of contact, contact staff, start a trial, and much more.

The role of the CTA is to entice visitors to take that final step and click to complete an action. That’s why CTAs can have a direct impact on your entire website’s success. Strong, persuasive CTAs can help increase sales, add more followers, attract a wider audience, and more.

Define Your Goals

The first step to perfecting your call-to-action is to have a clear understanding of your goals. Your website goal and the action you want someone to take should work together. If, for example, your site’s goal is to advance your job coaching services, the action you will be prompting would be scheduling an appointment, and the CTA might read something like: “Book Your First Session Here” or “Schedule a Free 30-Minute Consultation.”

There are times when you might want to direct site visitors to do more than one thing. For example, you want them to purchase one of your products and like your Facebook page. In this case, you will have more than one CTA on your site and you will need to prioritize them. You may choose to have one CTA more prominent on one page and the other on another page. You may also modify your site’s layout in a way that supports both CTAs without creating a competition between them.

Know Your Target Market

Knowing what you want to achieve is one thing, but you won’t get far if you don’t consider the needs and wants of your target market. Why are they coming to your site? What are they doing on your site? What are they looking for or hoping to accomplish? What tone of voice and vocabulary appeals to them?

You may want to start by doing some research and creating a profile (or persona) of your target audience. Once you get a sense of what motivates your audience you can phrase CTAs more effectively. Don’t be afraid to look at what your competitors are doing. You can learn a lot from others’ successes and failures.

They Can't Miss It

Your CTA should be visible. All of the efforts that you put into creating your CTAs will be useless if your site visitors are unable to find it on your site. Your website color palette should make the CTA stand out but not in a bad way. Choose a color combination that accentuates the CTA and calls for attention but doesn’t detract from your site’s personality.

Size is important. The proportions of CTA buttons or text you use on your site should reflect their unique role. You want visitors to notice your CTAs, but you don’t want to overwhelm or frustrate your visitors with huge text or buttons that distract.
Location is key. Where you choose to place the CTA can have all the impact on its performance. Experts say that CTAs should be located in prominent spots; that the space surrounding them should be free of clutter; and that they should not compete with other buttons in the same area. Remember that you are asking visitors to take action, so the request should appear at the moment when they’re ready for it.

Keep It Short and Clear

CTAs are brief and to the point. They describe the action straightforwardly – Download Your Copy, Register for a Free Trial, Buy This, Sign Up and Get $50 Off, Reserve Your Seat, etc. This type of copywriting may sound a bit bland, but CTAs are the final step in a process. Your site’s design, images, and text provide an atmosphere, information, and motivation to follow your call-to-action, while the CTA is there to give it a final push.

Power Verbs and Action Words

Compelling site visitors to take action requires proactive language. It’s no coincidence that CTAs begin with a powerful verb that determines what happens next and adding a sense of urgency strengthens the CTA’s impact. A powerful CTA motivates site visitors to take immediate action. Adding words like “Now,” “Here,” or “Today” to your CTAs helps to prompt quick reactions.

Offer an Incentive

When you’re asking your site visitors to do something for you, you should be willing to do something for them in return. If you want CTAs to appeal to your site visitors, you need to make sure the value that you are offering is clear, and that it appeals to your target market. For example, CTAs like “Start Free Trial,” “Personalize Your Order,” or “Download Now” all offer a certain incentive that allows visitors to visualize what they are getting out of the deal.

Don’t Forget the Rest of Your Site

Your entire web site design should support your CTAs as they are the culmination of your pitch to your site visitors. For example, your web page layout should direct visitors towards the CTA in a natural browsing flow. It also means freeing up some white space around the CTA, to make sure that nothing distracts the view away from it.

Track and Analyze Success

Analyzing the success rate of your CTA is crucial in evaluating your site’s overall performance and is a vital step towards improving your strategy for growth. An important metric that can help in guiding your evaluation is the conversion rate, which provides you with the tools to measure your CTAs’ success rates.

Test and Improve

After tracking and measuring your CTAs’ performance, you can experiment, compare, and improve various call-to-action schemes. Your analysis may show you that some colors bring in more clicks than others, or that the phrasing “Buy Now” is more effective than “Purchase Now.” Keep track of your different tests to better understand what triggers action with your target audience and continue to improve your CTAs accordingly.

Key Takeaways

A call to action (CTA) is a word, phrase or button designed to get an immediate response.
Calls to action use action verbs and a sense of urgency.
CTA should be visible, but not intrusive.
CTAs help improve the user experience and move prospects through the sales funnel.
It's important to test, track and analyze your CTAs effectiveness.

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