What is a Call to Action and Why Do You Need One on Your Website
A Call to Action (CTA) on a website is an instruction to the visitor in order to encourage them to take some kind of action. A Call to Action might be simple instructional text, such as “call us now”, “find out more”, or “subscribe to our Newsletter”.
After devoting time, effort, and money into creating a website to promote your services and products, the last thing you want is your visitors to leave without taking any action. By encouraging the visitor to take action, rather than merely reading and leaving your site, Call to Actions are simple and effective ways to generate conversions and ultimately boost sales.
The simple task of placing concise and easy-to-read CTAs on your website comes with a number of benefits to your business.
Motivate Visitors into Deeper Engagement
Rather than merely reading a piece of content then leaving your site, CTAs motivate your visitors into deeper engagement with your brand. For example, placing a link to your social media platforms at the end of a blog with the text “Follow us on Facebook”, is likely to help gain more social media followers. With more followers on Facebook, you can engage with customers and prospects and build your social media presence.
Boost Conversion Rates
Conversion rates are crucial for any business. Certain CTAs are designed to convert visitors into leads. For example, you could place a CTA on a landing page that encourages visitors to leave details such as their name, phone number, and email. It’s an effective way to get information you can use to build relationships with visitors and nurture leads.
Grow Your Email Subscribers
Getting more email subscribers is a key marketing objective of many businesses. Effective email marketing helps to generate and nurture leads, strengthen relationships with customers and clients, and help businesses acquire new customers.
The right CTAs can expand a business’ email database and list of contacts. As Hubspot notes, you can use these contacts and email subscribers to nurture and follow up with. Place Call to Action phrases and buttons on your website, blogs, and other content that encourages users to sign up for your email list.
Encourage People to Purchase Your Products or Services While ‘Stocks Last’!
One common and effective Call to Action is one that creates a sense of urgency and encouragers user to act now or else miss out on an “unmissable” deal.
For example, if you’ve got tickets for an event you are trying to sell, placing CTAs on your homepage, landing pages, in blogs, social media posts, or other publicly-visible platforms will help you sell tickets.
“Hurry! Only five tickets left!” is a CTA that creates urgency and promotes immediate action that we’ve probably all clicked on at some point.
Encourage Customers to Add to Their Cart
Ecommerce sites rely heavily on CTAs to persuade customers to buy their products. Items left in shopping carts is a challenge many businesses that sell online face. The right CTAs can help businesses overcome the issue of consumers abandoning their shopping carts before they reach checkout and complete the transaction.
“Add to Cart” or “Complete Purchase” CTAs help companies remind their customers to not only add their products to their shopping cart, but to complete the purchase.
Persuade People to Share
It’s in every business’ interest to have users not only view and like its online content, but also share it. The more that users share content like blogs and social media posts, the more people will view it and engage with the brand, ultimately growing its online presence and following.
Placing a “Share Now” button or text CTA at the bottom of content will encourage readers to do exactly that — share your content.
Learn More About Your Products or Services
Want people to learn more about what you do, what you can offer, and what differentiates you from competitors? Simply place a “Learn More” Call to Action at the end of a page or article to encourage readers to click to a page where they can find out more about the product, services, or topic.