Marketers have one goal: to generate and convert leads. But it became problematic since there is so much content on the Internet, especially in the last few years. It is only expanding, and it became hard to find and keep potential customers.
So, the question for marketers now is how to grab the attention of their potential customers and then keep their attention long enough to convert them into actual leads? The answer is a CTA (Call to action). With the help of this marketers tool, you can significantly increase your chances of attracting and converting potential customers.
What is a CTA?
“ A call to action (CTA) is a marketing term that refers to the next step a marketer wants its audience or reader to take.”
CTAs can be typically placed anywhere within your marketing, website, blog, email, or even within a blog post. One useful technique to get people to take action immediately is to add a sense of urgency and the fear of missing out, such as “limited time offer” phrase.
According to Investopedia: “The CTA can have a direct link to sales. For example, it can instruct the reader to click the buy button to complete a sale or it can simply move the audience further along towards becoming a consumer of that company’s goods or services. The CTA can suggest that the reader subscribes to a newsletter that contains product updates, for example. To be effective, a CTA should be obvious and should immediately follow the marketing message.”
Leaving CTAs out or your marketing strategy would certainly be a wrong thing to do, besides losing money. They are essential in directing a prospect to the next step of the sales funnel or process. So, if you haven’t already included it is a part of a marketing strategy, you should. It will help you get your target market motivated to take action and engage with your content.
Related: How to Improve Sales Funnel with the Help of Live Chat?
Typical Call to Action Phrases
Here’s a list of the typical call to action phrases you might find interesting.
- Sign-Up
- Register
- Call
- Subscribe
- Donate
- Buy
- Order
- Share
- Follow
- Download
- Click here for
The Importance of the CTA
The two most important thins about CTA: it leads a visitor to convert and helps you increase your click-through rate. The better your click-through rate, the better your ranking in search engine result pages (SERPs).
Since CTA is a key element on your webpage, it lets the user know what to do next. It’s estimated that 90% of people who look at a website will read the CTAs. If a CTA is written within the content, your conversion rate will increase by over 120%. So, without a good implemented CTA, the user may not know the next steps to take and is most likely to leave the site without accomplishing their task.
The Importance of CTA in Marketing
“In marketing, a call to action (CTA) is an instruction to the audience designed to provoke an immediate response, usually using an imperative verb such as “call now”, “find out more” or “visit a store today”. “
By having a great marketing campaign where your team develops new products and promotions, just imagine how much would your campaign increase by engaging the right visitor on your website with the right CTAs. Just think about the effectiveness. And that is just one of many ways why CTA marketing is so powerful.
According to a report by the Nielsen Norman Group, most visitors stick around for less than 59 seconds. So you can see that you need to focus and get customer attention in that first minute they approach your website, or you will lose them. In order to avoid that, you need to proactively engage with your visitors by using right CTAs, at the right time, based on information you know about your customers.
Use Targeted CTAs
You can target and convert people by using these three ways:
- Relevant campaigns — they are used to engage people on your site with relevant campaigns based on their behavior and interests.
- Intent targeting — one of the most effective ways to engage visitors with a relevant CTA; you can find out who your customers are, where are they coming from, the content of the page a visitor is on, and what intent is indicated by their behavior on your website.
- Target based on the stage of the funnel — with ConvertFlow, it’s easy for you to connect your email marketing tools and retarget the right people, with the right calls-to-action, using email subscriber data. This means you can engage, guide and convert people at every stage of your marketing funnel with the right CTAs.
Visual design matters
According to research, if you use different colors on your website you can inspire different emotions. That means that choosing the right color for you CTA is more important than you could think. To make your CTA stands out, use contrasting colors — colors that stand out but at the same time, works with the overall design of your website. A great example of such a practice is WordPress. White CTA buttons not only seamlessly blend into the website’s design but also immediately captures visitor attention.
Also, don’t forget about the CTA button. It can be round, circle or square, it is up to you. As long as the visitor can easily recognize it as a button, then it is good. But, if you want to play it safe, here is a tip — make your buttons square. They are one of the most popular shapes of buttons, as it is easy to recognize as a clickable object.
A/B Testing for CTAs
In order to find the combinations that appeal to your target audience and test the effectiveness of your marketing methods, you should run A/B testing.
A/B testing is testing where you simultaneously compare two versions of a subject to see which one performs better. You compare subjects by showing the two variants, for example, A and B to similar visitors at the same time. The solution that gives a better conversion rate, should be chosen as a winner.
Related: A/B Testing in Marketing
It is well known that every person will respond differently to various calls to action. To test the effectiveness of those actions on your website or landing page, you can use an A/B testing platform like Optimizely. This will eliminate any guesswork and give you data-backed information that helps you optimize for the highest-converting CTAs.
Also, it has been reported that simple A/B tests can up your conversions from 20 to 95 percent, so if you haven’t already tried it, you should.
Final Thoughts
As you can see, CTA marketing is the fastest way to double your conversion rates and generate more leads for products or services. While other marketing campaigns require you to invest a significant amount of time or money to get decent results, CTA marketing is one of the highest-ROI customer acquisition activities for your business.
Lastly, don’t forget to test your CTA because every business is different. By constantly measuring and analyzing, you can find out what works best for your customers, leading to a CTA strategy that converts to leads every time.
Originally published at https://www.paldesk.com on April 26, 2019.
