So what is a call to action? It is an image or line of text that leads your customers to take an action. This button should attract your audience and engage them long enough to peak their interest.
For marketers, the ultimate goal is to optimize CTAs and create a bridge of contact that doesn’t feel like a scam or over-cooked sales pitch.
4 Ways to Optimize CTAs
Step 1: Check how well it stands out
Contrast is the first step in testing the effectiveness of your CTA. Now this step is not all about color, it deals with how it stands out on a landing page or even how it compares to your display ads as well. The most important thing to keep in mind is creating a color-neutral presentation. This is because most sites are colorful and distracting and you want your CTA to stand out. If you are dealing with a “bland” page, making your colors more distinctive and it will work better.
Step 2: Keep your choices minimal
Choices is the second step that doesn’t need mentioned but often time get overlooked. We tend to think that more choices are better, but when it comes to your CTA less is the key. You don’t want to confuse your visitors with too many potential actions to choose from. Remember to only prioritize what you ultimately want your visitor to do.
Step 3: Make them easy to spot and understand
Affordance ties in both contrast and choices and tells the visitors what they can do with the button. Effective CTA’s are easy to spot and easy to understand. Making them effective means taking into account the shape, size, and position. Testing your contrast and choices are required but only doing means you are only doing the bare minimum.
Step 4: Say exactly what you want from the customer
Intent is the last step which simply means, creating your CTA with an action that is actually an action. You want it to say exactly what they will be doing or receiving when clicking. Using passive text tend to have a lower click through rate when compared to more action-orientated ones. You can even go deeper with a more emotional action like saying support rather then submit.
Testing to optimize CTAs with the right tools is crucial when optimizing your websites and display ads. These four simple steps give you the guideline to what you need to test and what can make it more effective.
