A call to action (CTA) is the messaging that tells your users what to do when they’re navigating through your website. While it might seem obvious –“Users must know what to do on a website, surely?” – It’s actually been proven to create a more seamless user experience as opposed to websites that don’t have clear messaging that tells people what to do.
The truth is, people can often feel a bit lost on a page if you don’t tell them what to do, which is the last thing you want your potential customers to feel! It’s also an essential aspect if you’re running a content marketing campaign.
What is a Call To Action?
A Call to Action is anything that instructs a user what to do next. It can be as simple as “Contact us now” with a clickable hyperlink that links to a contact form. “Find out more” is a popular choice but so are “read this”, “sign up”, “book now” and “click here.”
Crafting a CTA
Calls to action also become a lot more creative and compelling when adding a little more benefit to the messaging, for example:
“Become the leader you’ve always dreamed of being by signing up for your course here!”
This is telling the user that they can become everything they’ve wished for, by simply signing up for the course.
The “signing up” is the action, but the benefit is becoming a leader. Even though it seems obvious when you write it out like this, a user reading it amongst other copy on a website won’t see it as a forced piece of marketing copy. They will see it as an opportunity to get what they’re looking for.
Optimize Your Copy
It’s also important to ensure that the copy used on the call to action is as personal as possible. So instead of saying “Sign up for the course” a simple change to “Sign up for your course” already speaks to the singular person who is doing the searching and reading the copy.
If you’re writing your web copy, think about what action you want a user to take before you start constructing the copy. Then gear the entire draft of writing towards that action, with a final call to action at the end that will drive people to take the appropriate action.
Guide Your Users
You need to tell your users exactly what to do, otherwise, you’re losing out on valuable leads. CTA’s help users navigate your website more easily and achieve their own goals.
Another important aspect of how you structure your website is ensuring that it is responsive – read more on that here .
Find out more about how calls to action can transform the way your website works (see what we did there? Classic CTA!).