If you have a digital campaign strategized for the growth of your business, you must have a business goal in your mind as well. So what is the purpose of your marketing campaign? Do you want to increase subscriptions or boost sales, or is it just to redirect your readers to another page?
If you have a confident answer to this, how are you planning to engage your consumers to leap into the final action? Irrespective of your well-organized strategy, your marketing campaign might fail if you are unable to persuade your readers to make the final decisions.
This is where call-to-action (CTA) comes to play a great role in your digital marketing campaign. No matter how technologically advanced the entire marketing industry has become, the ultimate goal is always the same – to drive interested customers to take action. CTA directs your user to take an action and also guides on how to do it. A CTA can lead to landing pages, websites, blogs, or newsletters.
Why is CTA important?
A gallant, purposeful, and well-curated CTA can be a silver lining for your marketing campaign. An ideal CTA focuses on the powerful announcement of your organization’s motivation and is not just a random combination of words.
It is more effective than any long-form copy because CTA is the easiest and fastest way to push your potential customers to take action by making your objective clear. A CTA enables you to optimize your organization’s landing page and segment your traffic while increasing the customer conversion rate.
How to create a strong CTA that can compel your potential customers to engage with your offerings?
- The design of CTA buttons varies based on the business’ conversion goal and website style. So to generate a CTA that meets the terms of your objective, you must fix on your primary goal and craft the CTA around it.
- Use clickable CTA buttons that are capable of transporting your customers to the intended web page from where the user can proceed further with the procedure.
- Keep your CTA short and not more than six words. A long set of words can take away the visual impact of clickable buttons. To make your short-phrase impactful, you can use to-the-point and motivating words that are more action-oriented.
- Place your CTA twice, once on the top of your content, and once by the end of it so that the readers do not overlook it. Using CTA, both before and after your content, increases click-rate.
- Use contrasting colors for your CTA button that gets highlighted on your web page to grab your reader’s attention. Design a bold large and legible text for your CTA so that it is readable, but not too large to kill the professionalism of your content. To turn your CTA into a magic button for your customers, you need to make your CTA look like one.
- Leave a good white space around the text inside your CTA button to make it look more catchy and appealing. By following this, your CTAs become instantly recognizable and stand out from the rest of the page.
- Don’t forget to support and follow up on your CTA with instructions that explain the customer benefit on progressing with the CTA. You can also create some excitement by offering discounts for those who proceed with CTA while keeping your business value proposition intact.
- Don’t forget to test your CTA because technical glitches come about at the most unexpected place. Run it through A/B tests to identify the efficiency of your CTAs.
- Try to put yourself in the customer’s shoes and use first-person communication language to increase click rates.
- Create a sense of urgency in the content for your CTA to make your readers take immediate action. Stating that your offer is available for a limited time can convert potential customers into real ones in less time.
- Optimize your CTA for mobile users since most business messages get checked via smartphones, on the go, to save time. If you are unable to modulate your CTA for mobile users, you will lose a major section of your potential customers.
To understand better about the usage of a good CTA and how big brands have successfully nailed their CTA, here is a list of examples to inspire you towards a prosperous business.
- Bed Bath & Beyond, a personal care manufacturer, broke the rule of creating short CTA content and, instead, took a bold step by putting the entire offer disclaimer on their email CTA. The company used smart formatting with variation in size and style to fit the text appealingly on the CTA.
- Airbnb, the home-sharing platform, created a promotional video ad with beneficial content like “Do you want to make extra money?” targeting house owners. To help potential customers get a personalized answer to the asked question, they also offered an online tool to help them calculate exactly how much they can earn via Airbnb. As a final CTA, the company just used ‘Learn More, ’ and people were actually convinced to learn more.
- Instagram believes in simple CTA and has been successfully doing it via its interesting marketing campaigns. The social media platform uses one of its members’ past ad posts (with permission) to create a feeling of unity within all its users. This draws the attention of new users, especially advertisers, towards the photo and video sharing platform, and eventually used ‘Create Ad’ as the final CTA.
- Starbucks uses bold and relevant CTAs to increase click-rate. The retail coffee giant recently used nature-focused imagery highlighting the color green with a CTA that prompted readers to book their latest Iced Matcha Green Tea Latte online.
- Spotify has proved the efficiency of a good CTA with their creative touch. ‘Music You Love. Free.’ is a quote that will definitely attract the music lover’s attention. It offers direct ‘Install Now’ CTA for a segment of Instagram users, nailing its promotion services by creating high conversion of music listeners as their target market was able to reach the landing page just with one click.
It has been made clear that CTA cannot become perfect by following guidelines, but by understanding your business, its goal, and the target market. However, before you go too bold with your CTA, try following the guidelines, and once you are in full control of your marketing campaign, you can experiment with your CTA to analyze what works best for you.
