What Call to Action means and how it helps us?

There is not a 100% full marketing activity if you don’t ask your client to do something.

“Register here”

"Order now"

"Buy now"

The brands are placing those called “CTAs” at the end of each content, hoping that the client is direct interested by that content and he will comply with the request.

It is also understandable that CTAs are changing once passing the years, but their ending goal is still the same: to place their message in the front of the right people, at the right time, so that they what what’s to be done further.

It seems to be simple, but testing a CTA is, most of the times, something that marketing specialists put very much attention on. And when you figure out that 90% from your website’s visitors are reading not only your content, but also your CTAs, it is a must for your business to learn how to make a high quality “call to action”.

How do you improve your CTAs?

The companies are spending lot of time speaking about what they offer, about their products and services, and rarely they spend time thinking about how are their clients interact with their message of how they perceive it. More than that, the companies don’t understand the importance of how should they clearly ask a client to follow a “call to action”.

For example, Salesforce identified that brands who asked on Twitter for “retweets” (a simple social media call to action), received a big number of returns. Those who asked for a “retweet” received 10 times more RTs and those who spelled the word “retweet” received 23 times more.

The effective marketing should always contain a “call to action” which shows very clear what steps a client should do.

Let’s see the 4 steps useful for any business that will drive to the best results’ obtaining:

1. Clear and concise message

CTAs should be authoritative, clear and concise messages, easy to be identified and followed by a client.

A common mistake the majority of businesses do is that they use a super long CTA (ex. “Do not forget to register for receiving of our newsletter”). We should also keep in mind to exclude the using of the modal verbs (should, might, could). Using the modal verbs is creating uncertainty in the targeted public’s mind, presenting the action as an option (“Register for newsletter” is a authoritative CTA and will have higher success than “You can register for newsletter”).

The drop-out rate increases when a CTA becomes too complicated. When there are necessary forms to be filled in, ask for only those absolutely necessary information. Name, Email and Company should be enough for a follow-up with a potential client who followed a CTA, so he manifested his interest.

2. Communicate the benefits

The clients hate to be misled and always they will wait to receive something for their spent time. Before presenting them a CTA, any business should communicate the benefits and results their clients might be able to obtain. A concise CTA will contribute not only to the conversion rate’s increasing, but also to the respondents’ quality’s improvement (only direct interested people will follow a CTA, when the message is clear). The engagement quality will be surely improved, too.

3. Proper placements

A CTA location is very important. Oddschecker, a sports bet website, wanted to find that way to increase the registration rate on their website. Once tests were done, they figured out that the “sign-up” and “sign-in” buttons were not so easy to be found by the visitors. They decided to move those buttons’ location and placed them directly in the navigation bar. They reduced the search button, to properly integrate the buttons.

These changes generated an increasing of clicks on the “sign-up” button up to 406% and an increasing of registrations up to 82%.

4. Examine and replicate

As both technology and people’s behavior are permanently changing, the companies should be able to maintain their position and value by permanently examine their CTAs and making sure these are still driving to the wanted rate of conversion.

For example: while the “sign-up” button may function for the existent clients, this is not useful when speaking about people that revisit the site, but never made a purchase. An attractive CTA for these people could be “sign-up for our latest deals”.

Recap: make sure you have a visible CTA. Make it clear and personal. Make it easy to be identified and followed by clients.