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Imagine you’re out shopping at this place with a beautiful storefront and a ol’ big welcome sign over the front door. You toss your stuff in the cart, feeling jazzed, only to find there’s no cashier. In fact, there’s no till either. You’re all ramped up to make your purchase, but you’ve got nowhere to go from here. Weird, right?
Well, that’s how it feels to visit a website with no calls to action (CTA). Prospects end up stranded and confused, eventually wandering off to make their purchases elsewhere. To avoid this sales funnel limbo, you’ve got to have a strong CTA.
Leading Buyers Down the Sales Funnel
A CTA can be as simple as text (“To learn more, contact us today!”) or as fancy as a sign-up form that encourages readers to join an email list or download a free e-book. Regardless of its particular shape, every CTA acts as a tool that encourages customers to take the next step in the buyer’s journey. They love your content, they’re completely sold—but what do they do next? Your CTA answers that question.
A CTA has its roots in human behavioral science. It turns out people want to be told what to do. Following orders simplifies tasks and makes life easier in a sea of endless options. No matter how great your website design, being told to take the next step via your CTA is what seals the deal.
CTAs: What NOT to Do
Here are some awesome mistakes websites commonly make with their CTAs:
- Not having a CTA in the first place. Well, this is a no-brainer. If you don’t have any CTAs, the easiest way to fix this is to add some. Duh! Certainly encourage prospects to contact you, but CTAs can also be used to sign up for your newsletter, read more blog posts, check out your reviews or otherwise encourage traffic in the direction you want it to go.
- Having a generic CTA. Imagine walking into a store where everything’s labeled with the same exact “Buy Now!” sign. Boooo-ring! Think about where your CTAs are placed and which page they lead to, and customize content on both ends accordingly. For example, “Love us yet? Wait till you see what our customers say about us!” could work as a CTA that points the visitor to your online reviews page.
- Not considering where your prospect is in the customer journey. Every prospect visiting your website is at a different stage of the customer journey. At each stage, different content and different CTAs helps move them in the right direction down the sales funnel.
If all else fails, stick a carrot on the end of a stick and wait for someone to bite. Your CTA probably doesn’t suck but maybe click-through rates still aren’t what you want them to be. The last frontier with a CTA is to offer something of value with your CTA: “Click here and you’ll get this cool thing.” People just can’t resist free stuff.
Why You Really Need CTAs
You know we can’t leave you without throwing a few compelling statistics your way to drive the point home. Here we go:
- Email marketing that includes a CTA bumps up click-throughs by 371% and sales by 1617%
- One company found that making design changes to include CTA buttons increased their revenue by 83% in a single month
- Another company saw a 591% increase in conversions by making CTAs more prominent
There are a bunch more statistics we could list, like how orange buttons get more clicks than other colors, but the main takeaway here is that if you don’t have any CTAs, go add some pronto. If you’ve got ’em, maybe it’s time to revisit and see how you can spiff those suckers up. But either way, be sure you’re not leaving your ready-to-purchase-right-now leads with no direction about where they should go next.
