5 Ways To Optimize Your Call to Action To Improve Conversion Rates

Your primary call to action is the single most important conversion point.  It is not your landing page, shopping cart or a shiny Adwords or Facebook ad. Your call to action is the big deal. Understandably, most marketers focus their energies on large-scale campaigns in an effort to build conversions. After all, clients are paying big bucks to see an increase in signup rates, landing page conversions, and sales at the checkout point. But, have a look at these small-time tactics that can help you to improve your call to action to help you improve conversion rates:

1.     Pair your call to action with where buyers are on the conversion cycle

A major tenet of content marketing is delivering content based on consumers’ personas and intentions. The same applies to your call to action—different types of consumers require different prompts depending on where they are on the sales cycle.  The call to action you display for site visitors should be markedly different from what you would require from a lead. For example, a new site visitor  who is unfamiliar with your brand is likely to respond better to a call to action asking him to download a free introductory e-book about “Twitter Advertising,’’ than he would to a call to action asking him to buy your new, “hot in the market” product that will help him manage his Twitter ad campaign.

2.   Contrast is More Important Than You Think

Humans literally depend on contrasts for survival. It’s just how we make decisions when presented with various options. We look at how different A is from B and we choose either one of these depending on our sensibilities. Your call to action design can significantly lower or improve conversion rates. A call to action that does not blend in with your overall brand theme or simply lacks the design aesthetics to make it noticeable may not be very effective.

The goal of a call to action is to be distinguishable from the rest of the content on the page. This calls for careful thought about colour, copy, size, images, background and fonts as you optimize your call to action. The best way to know what’s working and what is not is to test different calls to action against the control. Tweak the colours, copy, button design, click triggers, or number of actions on the homepage to determine which call to action is generating high conversions. An A/B test can also give you insights into user behaviour such as the keywords they are using to find your content and the kind of content they resonate with the most.

3.   Make The Options Fewer and Impactful

A major challenge facing marketers is getting consumers to undertake certain actions, all of which are important conversion points. This is especially true for ecommerce businesses selling numerous products and offering plenty of sales, all fighting for the customers’ attention. When consumers are faced with too many choices, they are less likely to convert into buyers. They may be stuck at the browser phase or simply head off to a less confusing site. People often make better decisions and thus feel happier when they are presented with fewer choices. This ‘feel good’ factor plays an important role in the conversion process, as consumers are more likely to make a purchase if they are feeling good about it. So, identify what your primary call to action is and make it dominant by implementing design, copy and placement changes. If you have more than one primary call to action, remove all distractions and make it easy for consumers to make simple, linear decisions. Your job as a marketer is to determine where most visitors want to go on a website and simplify that process for them.

4.   It Matters What Your Copy Is All About

In the content marketing world, we are beseeched to stay away from first person talk. But did you know that using the first person in your calls to action to address consumers can boost your conversions by 90%? Using the first person empowers the consumer and makes them feel that they are making their own decision to ‘signup’, ‘download’ or ‘buy.’ So instead of your button reading “Sign Up For Your 20 Day Free Trial,” tweak it to “Give Me My 20 Day Free Trial.” Do you see how this takes the focus from you and makes it about the consumer and his power to make decisions?

5.    Using Click Triggers To Boost Conversions

Joanna Wiebe over at Copy Hackers introduces an interesting concept of adding click triggers around your call to action to boost desired conversions. Click triggers eliminate worry and delight the buyer so he is more likely to click through your call to action. Click triggers can be reviews, security messages to assure buyers that your platform is safe, guarantees, (e.g. money back guarantees), low price offers, free shipping icons etc. When the right click trigger is used alongside the call to action buyers are likely to feel secure enough to make a purchase, sign up or download. While the big-time marketing campaigns are certainly important to your online business bottom-line, small tweaks to your call to action can have even more impactful results and improve conversion rates and ultimately, your profits.

Are you spending enough time considering each call to action you make?