6 Best Practices for Writing an Irresistible Call-to-Action (CTA)
When marketing your business, it is essential to have clear, well-written calls-to-action (CTAs) included in your marketing content. A CTA helps guide potential customers visiting your website or social media to take the next step, transforming leads into valuable conversions. Check out these best practices for writing irresistible calls-to-action and start seeing results for your small business!
1. Use Action-Oriented Text
A good call to action should tell the visitor the next step to take. Get straight to the point and tell your audience precisely what they should do. For instance, if you want them to sign up for your newsletter, download an app, or call you through the available phone number, be sure to make the call-to-action clear. The first word within your CTA should be action-oriented, such as contact, download, buy, explore, schedule, start, etc. to help direct your audience to the next step.
2. Create a Sense of Urgency
Leveraging “fear of missing out” (FOMO) can be a powerful marketing tool if properly utilized. Create a sense of urgency within your CTAs help to prevent potential customers from delaying taking further action. To create this sense of urgency without coming across as too aggressive, try using time-oriented words like “today” or “now” within your CTAs. Additionally, you can more subtly leverage FOMO by including elements like a countdown until the promotion ends, number of remaining seats available for a seminar, or an interactive calendar showing remaining availability.
3. Make It Stand Out
When crafting your content, it is imperative to create appealing CTAs that stands out and motivate online visitors to reach out. Play around with different fonts and font sizes (various headings), contrasting colors, or even creating call-to-action buttons to draw the attention of your audience. Be sure that the final CTA still looks professional and complements your brand.
4. Focus on the Value
An excellent CTA should provide value to your audience. Within your call-to-action section, include valuable information about what your audience can gain by completing the next step. This should revolve around how your products or services will add value to their lives. If the immediate step is simply downloading a whitepaper or scheduling an initial free consult, focus on the benefit that the next step will yield.
5. Keep CTAs Brief
When writing CTAs, it is best to keep them short, sweet, and to the point. Avoid using unnecessary words in your CTA section, as lengthy text can cause readers to quickly lose interest. The CTA can be in the form of linked text or a button. We recommend keeping your linked CTAs between two and five words long. Of course, you may have longer content (e.g. headings, benefits, etc.), but be sure that the final linked CTA does not get lost within the content.
6. Run Experiments (A/B Tests) and Measure Your CTA’s Success
No matter how perfectly you think you crafted your call-to-action, you must measure your CTA’s success. This can be difficult to do without the right tracking mechanisms. Fortunately, there are numerous conversion rate optimization (CRO) tools that can help you both measure your results as well as run experiments to see which call-to-actions lead to the most desired outcomes. Additionally, may of these tools are quite easy to setup and are remarkably affordable.
Our favorite, affordable CRO tool is Zoho PageSense. With Zoho PageSense you can run A/B tests where you can test different CTAs and determine which one leads to the most conversions through actual user data. This helps take the guesswork out of optimizing your CTAs.
Additionally, Zoho PageSense has other valuable tools as a part of their platform including session recordings, heatmaps, goal tracking, form analytics, personalization, polls, and more.
Get a free trial of Zoho PageSense today.
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At Igniting Business, we strive to help your small business stand out! For more tips on writing irresistible content and CTAs, subscribe to our newsletter! To learn more about our content marketing services, contact our team today! Stay tuned for our upcoming blog post to learn which CTAs to use on your website to increase revenue!
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About the author
Ben Seidel is the CEO and Founder of Igniting Business. Ben has been serving hundreds of small businesses with web design and SEO services for over 15 years and covering digital marketing related topics since 2012.
Over the years, Ben has been recognized on a local and national level, including entrepreneurship awards from both the NFIB and NASE and being featured in publications such as CNBC Universal, Yahoo News, Intuit Small Business, CIO.com, Mizzou Magazine, and Fox Business.