Chintan Zalani
Even if you’ve made a tasty offer and written a scintillating product description for hooking your audience…You won’t be able to convert your traffic without a compelling CTA. But what is Call to Action writing, and how do you do it right?
After your visitors read through your landing page narrative, feel convinced about your product/service and are on an emotional high:
You need to pull the trigger by clearly specifying the next profitable action you want them to take.
Don’t assume that your prospects know the next step.
In digital marketing, clicks are the currency that leads to sales. And with a badly-fitting CTA button, you’ll get lower click-throughs and sales.
Here are 3 stats that prove the importance of CTA buttons in your advertising efforts:
- In 2013, Small Business Trends found that 70% of B2B small business websites lack a CTA.
- As per a 2012 Go-Globe analysis, only 47% of websites have a clear call-to-action button.
- More than 90% of visitors who read your headline also read your CTA copy.
If you’re still around, I assume you want to drive more conversions by optimizing your CTA buttons. The placement, color and size of your CTA play an important role in drawing the attention of your visitors.
But in this article, I want to help you write engaging copy for your CTA buttons. It’s such an impactful element that even adding four words can increase your CTR to the payment page by 213%.
Ready to write relevant and action-oriented CTA copy?
Then let’s begin with having a look at the CTA mistakes that destroy your sales.
3 call to action button mistakes that can destroy your sales
Whether they use traditional direct response mails or landing pages, amateur marketers usually end up committing some common mistakes. This leads to loss of visitor interest and finally they reject your offer.
It doesn’t have to be that way though.
I’ve compiled 3 such mistakes along with the solutions to them.
1. Your CTA doesn’t speak of the benefits that your audience gets for taking action
Unless you have valuable offerings for your audience, they won’t stick around on your landing page/website. Because people mostly care about themselves.
And with the decreasing attention spans, it’s important to put the BENEFITS of your product front and centre.
Remember that I am not talking about the features of your product. Your audience doesn’t care about the insane capabilities of your product; rather, they want to know how it can improve their lives.
How to resolve this call to action issue: By researching your audience needs and delivering a value-adding offering that solves a pain point (consider creating buyer personas for the same).
For instance, Neil Patel from Quick Sprout targets digital marketers that are looking for ways to improve their website traffic. So he offers a free course to his readers to ‘double their traffic in 30 days.’
Note that besides being beneficial, your offer also has to be relevant.
Highrise changed their call-to-action button copy from “Free Trial” (benefit-oriented since they were offering a free product) to “See Plans and Pricing.”
The result?
A 200% increase in sign-ups.
In this case, visitors might have had a fear of getting locked in a subscription they didn’t want. And the copy “See Plans and Pricing” has an exploratory vibe with it that prompts action.
But overall, you should try to keep your CTA copy as specific and relevant as possible. No prizes for guessing the winner in the battle below.
2. Your advertisement contains multiple offers and calls to action that confuse the visitor
I understand…
Your business targets multiple buyer segments and you have to appeal to different personas.
But you can’t expect your visitors to do the hard work on your behalf. You want them to (eventually) get their wallets out anyway.
In short: Don’t create a single landing page (or advertisement) with multiple offers that try appealing to different segments of your audience.
Look at the eCommerce website for buying cheap fragrances below. They don’t show you any information about their business or their products on their homepage until you click on one of the three buttons.
Now that’s the kind of thing you have to avoid:
Asking for extra effort from the user.
Most visitors won’t hesitate to click the back button.
How to resolve this call to action issue: Always remember that one landing page is meant to convert traffic for one marketing goal.
Instead of asking for extra effort, pre-qualify your audience and send targeted traffic to customized landing pages on your website.
Here’s a simple illustration by ConversionXL that shows how multiple variables can be used to broadcast different versions of your landing page to different visitors.
Furthermore, you also need to repeat your offer multiple times to ensure that your message is clear. Also, make sure that your audience can effortlessly latch on to the next step, once they have made up their mind.
Email newsletters by professional marketers always contain three CTAs for easy access to their offer.
Here’s an email from Copyblogger asking the subscribers for buying the ticket to their Digital Commerce Summit. Note how they have one CTA at the top of their email.
After offering relevant information about the summit, they end with two CTAs at the end of their email.
3. The landing page copy doesn’t drive forward momentum
While we’re talking about getting more clicks on the CTA, it’s easy to forget about an important writing aspect that persuades your customers…
The copy that surrounds your CTA.
The goal of this text is to make the specifics of your offer clearer, address the associated fears of your customers and create a memorable conversion journey for your customers. You need to grab the attention of the reader and create anticipation for your offer with this copy.
Most businesses fail to craft engaging copy that answers their readers’ questions and evokes emotions. Hence their audience doesn’t act on the offer.
How to resolve this call to action issue: Research the EXACT words that your audience uses for describing their problems.
Joanna Wiebe calls them “trigger words.” And using them in your copy can be the difference between a customer taking his wallet out or passing on your offer.
You’ll find them by checking the forums and websites your audience likes to hang out on. Brian Dean stalked Quora and SEO forums to find the phrase “Google hates my site” being used often. He then used it in the title of his article.
Similarly, you can look at customer reviews of popular products at Amazon.
You can also consider surveying your customers for finding these “trigger words.”
Further, aim at creating urgency and scarcity with your CTA button copy and surrounding text. Peep Laja managed to increase his sales by 332% by using this technique.
One way of doing it is by using timing words.
You can also consider adding a countdown timer with your offer.
Alright, now that you’re aware of the common mistakes, let’s look at 4 ways to write compelling CTA copy.
