Guiding website visitors down your sales or conversion funnel largely depends on the quality of your CTAs. Mundane or mediocre design, formatting, and copywriting might earn their fair share of clicks – but personalized CTAs will perform 202% better.
Missing out on this wealth of conversions, considering how simple it is to optimize your calls-to-action, would truly be a waste. So, let’s talk about the best tactics that produce great CTAs.
Use Striking (But Complementary) Colors
The first thing they teach you in CTA writing school is to make them pop. Since this is arguably the most important (i.e., most valuable) element of a page, it needs to be clearly visible yet not so obnoxious as to take all of a visitor’s attention.
Color theory will come in handy. Choose a CTA color complementary to the rest of your page. Or, choose a color that is in line with your brand’s ethos and overall branding.
Let’s take Grammarly as our example. Their CTAs are the same green as their logo (currently blue and yellow as a sign of support for Ukraine). It blends well with the blues, greens, and purples on their website, but it’s bold enough to be highly clickable.
Image source: Grammarly.com
Make the Label Action-Focused
Actionable CTAs often inspire higher click-through rates than dull, static ones. They make a conversion feel more powerful and manage to convey extra achievement. It’s no longer just moving a mouse and clicking a button: it’s taking action.
The MarketBeat homepage is a terrific example of using action-focused labels on CTAs. The page has almost a dozen calls to action, each of them containing a verb like “discover,” “see,” “listen,” and “read” rather than simply labeling the CTA’s destination.
Image source: Marketbeat.com
Simplified uses “Get started for free” with a similar effect. It’s not just a plain “sign up,” even though that’s what you are essentially doing. It now seems like the start of a journey.
Use Words That Promote Urgency
The fear of missing out has for a long time been hailed by copywriters as the magic bullet for conversions. And while audiences have become somewhat desensitized by the practice, it does still have a powerful effect.
These types of CTAs work better when there is actually something to miss out on. Limited time offers and seasonal deals will be best promoted with an “until Friday” or “while stocks last” type of CTA.
You can incorporate the words “now” or “today” into your CTAs to highlight that sense of urgency without actually making customers feel slightly uncomfortable or pressuring them into making a purchase. La Roche Posay does this with their “shop now” CTA, and they do manage not to sound too pushy.
Image source: Laroche-posay.us
Experiment with Pronouns
Since we already know that personalized CTAs have a better conversion rate, gearing them towards individual audience members is a given. However, you should also figure out whether speaking to them in the first or second person works better.
For example, Headspace uses a “start your free trial” CTA. As it speaks directly to the audience and highlights the benefits of conversion, it’s a very decent choice. It may arguably work better, though, had they said: “start my free trial.”
Crazy Egg tells you to “show me my heatmap.” This level of personalization can work better, as it implies the data is specific to the user, so it forges a different level of relationship with the brand.
Image source: Crazyegg.com
You won’t know which option works best unless you try both of them out. Make sure the pronoun is the only thing you actually change, so as not to skew your results.
Integrate the Action with the Device
Action CTAs should also immediately trigger said action. If you say “call us today,” the user shouldn’t have to switch to their phone app and paste the number in. The CTA should instantly launch it.
Brakes to You incorporated this feature, and their “call” CTA gets you in touch with the service immediately.
Image source: Brakestoyou.com
It’s a very simple CTA hack but hugely effective, especially for any local brands that are expecting to see a high number of phone inquiries.
Show Your CTA Early
Where you place your CTA matters immensely. Most people will never make it to the bottom of your page, so writing conversion-focused copy and only allowing for it to happen after a couple of scrolls will significantly lower those conversions.
Instead of hiding your important CTAs low on the page, keep them above the fold on all devices, screen sizes, and orientations.
Most brands forget to re-optimize their CTAs for mobile, so they are moved lower on the screen or they are hard to click. Mint Mobile did a great job of placing their most valuable CTA high up, and they’ve also kept it there on mobile. They have several CTAs on the homepage, but the one that is most useful to customers is the one they lead with.
Image source: Mintmobile.com
Don’t Be Afraid to Duplicate Core CTAs
While it’s perfectly okay to have several important CTAs on a page, it is just as important to keep reinforcing your key messages. You don’t have to show your critical CTA only once. As long as you are not overwhelming your visitors with too much clutter and the page looks clean, the number of identical (or similar) CTAs won’t matter.
Take a look at Robinsons Facilities Services. They basically have just one CTA: call us or send us an email. They have featured it across their homepage, which makes it easy to actually convert from any point. Instead of going out of their way to come up with different CTAs, they focus on what their customers need: to speak to a human.
A/B Test Constantly
Finally, the best call-to-action practice of 2022 is to constantly keep building on the data you have about how users respond to your various CTAs. Take the above tips into account, and track conversion and retention rates for each of them.
Different users will respond differently, so the only way to perfect what you have already improved is to keep collecting data and responding to it whenever you gather enough insight.
Final Thoughts
All of these CTA best practices are easy to action and implement, but they will need a bit of personalization too. You still want them to be in line with your core brand messaging and identity.