Call to Action: What is a CTA?
Call To Action
A call to action or CTA aims to persuade a visitor to perform a certain action immediately. It is an image, button or line of text that prompts your visitors, leads, and customers to take an action. It is, quite literally, a "call" to take an "action". The action you want people to take could be anything: download an eBook, sign up or register for a webinar, Start a free trial, Get a free consultation etc. A CTA can be placed anywhere in your marketing such as on your website, in an eBook, in an email, or even at the end of a blog post. CTA (call to action) is not just limited to ecommerce sites. Every website should have an objective it wants users to complete whether it is filling in a contact form, signup for a newsletter or volunteering their time.
How to Create Effective Calls To Action
Marketers employ a number of strategies for creating Calls To Action. To save you time and effort, here's a quick checklist for the essential elements of a quality Calls To Action.
Good Design: Your Calls To Action colors should contrast with your website design, yet also appear large enough to be noticed. For ex: A colorful button that contrasts with the color of the page is a good strategy to get the user's attention.
Clear Benefit: People should know exactly what will happen when they click on a Calls To Action. Stating a clear benefit that the user will get from completing the transaction is an effective way to get them to click. Also make sure the CTA explicitly tells them what they're getting in exchange for their click.
Short in Length: Whether it's an image or a phrase, ensuring the instructions are simple, and the path to engagement is easy will ensure a higher number of your audience will call, or click-through on the action you ask them to. A good call to action should be a short phrase, not a sentence. Most are no longer than five words.
Add a Sense of Urgency: Creating a sense of urgency gets customers to take action immediately instead of holding off on the purchase. More often than not, tomorrow becomes eventually, which ends up being never. The sooner you can get people to take action, the better. Adding a sense of urgency is a critical component of every Calls To Action.
Actionable Text: A couple of words is best, no more than five is ideal. Also, written in the imperative mood gives a clear and direct command of what to do.
landing page with logical flow: If you design your landing page with an intuitive, logical flow, your CTA will be more effective. The landing page will actually prime the mind for action by intensifying the expectation and anticipation, creating a more fluid transition into the call to action. Because the call to action should be the most noticeable thing on the page, the font size should be large enough to command attention.
There are thousands of call to action phrases you can implement to drive more engagement and interest for your blog posts, sales pages and social media posts. Psychology is behind everything we do, which includes Calls To Action. When you create a Calls To Action on a landing page or elsewhere, you're tapping into a person's inner psychology. Knowing this psychology helps you more capably target it and score higher conversions.
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