The outlook of your website plays an important role in its success. Website elements like call to action buttons or contact forms, when placed correctly can turn your leads into sales. Similarly, an easy to navigate website is not going to feel overwhelming to a visitor looking for information about your business. In this blog, we’ll take a look at how to use a call to action to improve your website’s readability and navigation, as well as convert your leads into sales by guiding visitors to the desired areas of your website.

What is a Call to Action (CTA)?

A call to action is a prompt that invites the visitor to take action to learn more or become a part of whatever it is that you are offering on your website. It could be a button labeled ‘Subscribe Now for a 7-Day Free Trial’ or ‘Get in Touch with Us for a Free Consultation’ etc. Depending on the nature of your business, you can use the CTA to guide your audience towards your goal, gather their info for later use (especially for marketing), or simply enable them to become loyal visitors or customers.

CTA Placement

A CTA can only be effective when placed in the correct areas of your website. ‘Above the Fold’ placement has been popular among advertisers for some time now. It is without a doubt a safe and proven placement area for your CTA. However, such a placement doesn’t work for everyone. You have to consider the nature of your business, your customers, and the amount of information you want to give them before inviting them to take a particular action. This could mean your call to action is at the bottom of the page. As long as you are sure that your customer will read the whole webpage, placing a CTA at the bottom isn’t bad. Also, make sure your CTA looks OK on mobile devices.

A/B Testing: If in doubt, you can easily test a few placement areas over a few days to see which one works best. A/B testing is when you place the same ad in different locations to see which one works best. Get creative with your testing strategies, you never know what kind of placement brings awesome rewards!

Types of CTAs

There are two types of CTAs.

Soft CTAs: Soft CTAs invite the user to proceed towards a certain soft goal, but not your main goal. For instance, if you are selling dog food, you might place a CTA calling visitors to ‘Join our 10,000+ strong community of dog lovers’. You could then ask them to also join your mailing list for future updates. Both these actions help you gain a loyal and regular visitor whom you can sell more dog food later.

Hard CTAs: Using our above dog food example, a hard CTA would ask the user to buy dog food without any fuss. For instance, you could offer them a discount which would directly lead them to the product page where they can buy the product. Such a CTA could look like ‘Buy Today and Get 40% off’ or ‘Limited Time Offer, Get 20% cash-back on your shopping today’.