Captain Obvious’ 4 Easy Tweaks to Improving your Calls to Action

You know those 3am infomercials that promise a device that will cook a Thanksgiving dinner while you sit in your underwear all day playing Xbox?

I’m thankful for Red Bull and colostomy bags.

Unfortunately in marketing there’s no set it and forget it button. The key to great marketing is to try new things and to keep evolving content so that you can continue dialing it in to your customer personas.

Calls to action are an important part of your website. These are the action items that drive people to your landing pages where the real goods are. So, think about the calls to action on your website. What do they say? Do they simply read ‘Contact Us’ or ‘Buy Now’? If those are the only interactive options that your site offers then there’s a good chance you’re alienating a huge portion of your target audience.

Having great calls to action throughout your website will help direct people to the proper landing pages, but how effective are yours? To determine this you’re going to need to do a little testing.

Dude, it’s a button. How hard can it be?

You may be surprised at how tweaking a few simple things can affect your click through rates. Here’s a few:

1. Button Color

You may be saying “I could have thought of that one, Benjamin Franklin”, but you’d be surprised at how often something as simple as button or link color is overlooked. Do your buttons blend in too much with the rest of the design elements on the page? Some companies have an obsession where everything needs to match. Don’t be afraid to break the brand style guide on your calls to action. Sometimes a little clash gets attention.

2. Button Size

“Thank you again, Captain Obvious.” In addition to button color, once again the size of a call to action is often overlooked. Does it blend in or is it so overpowering that it is dismissed as 3rd party advertising? As you begin testing various sizes for your CTAs you’ll start dialing in the most productive button size for your website.

3. Text vs. Image

Is your website image or text heavy? Another image pasted in amongst a slew of other imagery may just get lost in the crowd, and the same for more text within a block of text. Test out some combinations of image and text CTAs combined with color and sizing to find out what works for you.

4. Copy

Remember that a call to action has to be enticing enough for a user to want to click on it and move on to a landing page. This means the copy that you use needs to have enough impact to make people take action. For example, there are many ways you could download content. You could download it, get it, grab it, buy it, receive it or own it. The words you choose for your CTAs can make a big impact. Call on the Thesaurus if you need to.

He's the most poetic and cultured of all the dinosaurs. He puts the tea in T-Rex.

These 4 ridonculously easy tweaks are ones you start implementing into website today without even considering other important elements like CTA placement or adding time sensitive messaging. This beginner’s guide to creating great calls to action will only be effective however, if you keep testing and trying new things and measuring the results. It’s only then that you can start making changes for the better, whether that’s with calls to action or marketing in general.

“There’s a fine line between fishing and just standing on the shore like an idiot.” – Steven Wright