Call to Action: 5 Reasons Your Website Needs a Strong CTA

Understanding ‘Call to Action’: Definition, Elements, and Why Your Website Must Have It.

Do you have a well-designed, easy to navigate website for your business? Well, then half the job is done!

But even if your site is exceptionally attractive and user-friendly, it isn’t 100% optimized until it provides its visitors with clear and direct instructions on what they should do after arriving at one of your landing pages.

Calls to action (CTA) can provide this guidance and steer your web visitors towards the path that will convert them into customers. Virtually every successful business and eCommerce website on the internet today uses CTAs to structure its visitors’ journeys. If you want to boost your conversion rates and amplify your sales, you should too.

What Is a Call to Action?

Simply put, a call to action is a strategic tool that you can use to get your website users to take the next step in their journeys on your site. Ideally, that next step would be to make a purchase, to contact you directly, book an appointment with you, or to sign up for your mailing list so that you can send them targeted email campaigns.

There are other end goals for CTAs as well. Your call to action could prompt your visitors to read a blog article on your site, watch a video, share a post or link with their social media followers, or even download a free eBook or resource that you have provided.

CTAs are also highly effective when used as part of a cross-selling approach. When your website contains something similar to a product or service that your target audience is looking at, you can use a call to action to offer them your alternative for consideration. This tactic is often used in the eCommerce industry as product recommendations and upsells.

The Elements of an Effective Call to Action

Calls to action can be quite diverse in their presentation, but they tend to focus on employing similar forms of direct language. Effective CTAs will almost always include terms like:

• Subscribe
• Buy
• Invest
• Register
• Donate
• Contact
• Book your appointment.

Any CTA you choose to include on your website should stand out on your landing pages and be easy for your visitors to see. It should accurately convey the value of the content or product it leads to, and it should contain written copy that makes your web visitors want to take immediate action and click on the link provided.

Take a close look at your website when crafting CTAs. It’s essential that you do as much as possible to provide every one of your web visitors with adequate direction when they arrive at your site.

Many business operators and eCommerce entrepreneurs become so used to their own websites that they may not even realize that they’re missing out on opportunities to turn visitors into leads. You may know that something on your website is relevant to your visitors’ searches. But this doesn’t mean that they will automatically know where to look.

You can use calls to action to guide them towards this information and persuade them to engage further with your brand.

Why Every Website Needs a Strong Call to Action

You’ve probably devoted hours upon hours of effort on b2b web site design and optimizing your website to get your business’s digital presence on the map. After all that time and money spent, it simply won’t do your company any good to have visitors leave without taking action or becoming paying customers.

You can discourage people from reading your content and clicking away by using CTAs to encourage your visitors to take action.

Calls to action are simple yet effective tools to generate conversions, boost your sales, and ensure that potential customers know exactly what you and your brand offer them.

The benefits of adding CTAs to your website include:

The ability to motivate visitors to engage more deeply with your brand.

Engagement is key when it comes to generating leads and conversions online. To demonstrate this point, businesses that add their social media links at the bottom of their landing pages with a CTA that states, “Follow us on social media!” are significantly more likely to accumulate social followers than their rivals.

The ability to increase conversion rates.

Many CTAs are designed and intended to convert visitors into leads. One popular approach involves including a CTA on your landing page asking visitors to leave details such as their names, email addresses and contact numbers. You can use this information to build connections, nurture leads, and send potential customers outbound marketing messages that will persuade them to invest in your products and services.

The opportunity to expand your email subscriber list.

Smart email marketing strategies will help your business to generate and nurture leads, strengthen customer relationships and help you to acquire new and loyal customers as well. The right CTAs that encourage your website visitors to sign up for your mailing list can help to rapidly expand your email subscriber database.

The chance to teach people more about your products, services and mission.

Whether you have an e-commerce site that sells products directly, an online portfolio website that showcases your creative works, or any other digital business, your aim is to tell people about what you offer. Visitors that understand your business and what it brings to the table are more likely to become paying customers at some point.

You can use a ‘Learn more’ call to action to share your mission, beliefs and offerings with your visitors and to encourage them to get to know you and your brand better.

Encouraging positive word of mouth and social referrals.

The more your visitors share and engage with your website, blog posts and product pages, the more people will view it. Thereby improving your online presence and growing your brand’s recognition.

Placing a ‘Share now’ CTA button beneath your content will prompt your readers and visitors to share the information with their friends, followers and colleagues. This could result in more exposure and more business for you.

CTAs Equal Conversions

Adding a call to action to your business website will encourage your visitors to sign up, learn more, reach out to you, give you their contact details. Ultimately, it leads to them becoming paying customers.

A quality CTA makes it easy for website visitors to take action by eliminating dilemmas and handling their anticipated hesitations in a proactive way.