Call To Actions or "CTA" can make or break a website
A CTA can take many forms but should always perform its purpose when trying to get your website visitors to perform an action. Many good web designers overlook how important Call To Actions are for their client’s web designs. In many circumstances they are the very reason the site exists in the first place. I know it sounds obvious, but the first thing we try to define as web designers is “What is the website trying to offer?”. “How do we guide the visitors to engage on that offering.”.
Standard ones include:
- Selling a Product or Service Offering
- Membership or Automated Service
- Collect Prospect Information
- Attracting Traffic for Promotional Reasons
- Engage in a funnel or automation sequence
In most cases many visitors that come to a website are looking for something specific. I would estimate that 99% of visitors are not going to read though all your content and surf your entire site. That being said you need to get that 99% to understand your offer and engage right off the bat. Otherwise your site is just sitting there throwing away traffic and money.
I break down visitors/users into two types, lazy and not lazy. A lazy visitor is shopping “right then and there”. They want to make a quick decision based on what service/ product they are looking for pretty quickly. These types of visitors require that you design and place your call to action in an obvious and eye catching way. Usually they want to get in and get out.
A visitor that is not so lazy will do a little research. They need to be coached toward the goal using more subtle call to actions. If you want to get the most out of every visitor, building the site for both types is what needs planning.
A really good example of a successful CTA modification we made to a client’s site can be found at www.renewman.com. This company was getting an unbelievable amount of traffic but were not getting much of an ROI. When we compared the amount of visitors they were getting something was off. Blue Light Labs took a good look at how the site was visually sculpted and where the call to actions were, as well as how they are presented. After we implemented more visually recognizable Call to Actions and added a mini form on the home page, leads more than doubled over night. This client experiment made us begin to start paying attention to Cal to Action design, placement and the conversion rates. The mini form alone allowed visitors that where interested in the companies deliverables to type in a quick name, email. To our surprise there were more visitors that used this method of communication than ones that called the toll free number. This might not be the case with all sites but it did prove the importance of Call to Action Sculpting.
Most people read left to right and like a type writer their eyes will catch the first obvious option to the right of the page. Always try to keep this in mind. There is quite a bit a psychology involved when placing a CTA on a page.
Throughout your internal pages you should also always have an easy to access Call to Action. Visitors need to have the option to engage any time when surfing sub pages. It is also helpful to experiment with different titles and slogans. Google has a service called Google Experiments. It allows webmasters and web designers try out different layouts options by split testing. Using this tool can be useful when analyzing traffic. Visitor flow and bounce rates can get measured and compared to modified template versions.
