Call to What?

Every great website has goals, which can come in many flavors. They can be basic like joining a newsletter or contacting you for more information or they can be complex like achieving a 50% add-on rate for product X or convincing someone why your services will perform better than your competitors. Your site needs to have direction to lead users to these goals and a call to action is great way to provide this direction for your users.

Creation

Every call to action comes with two important parts, the message and the ability to stand out.

The Message - Your message must be short, appeal to your target user and it must be actionable (hence the name). Each call to action will take you to a landing page (which we will discuss in a later article) such as a form, sign-up or product sales and your message should correspond to this page. . Some examples of a call to action message might be “Free Consultation – Get Started” or “50% off – 2 Day Sale – Start Shopping”

Ability to stand out – The second important aspect of a call to action is its ability to stand out on a page. Your call to action should be an attention grabber. Some techniques to do this are increasing font size, changing color, use of an image, creative spacing and hovers but there are always more ways.

Example Time

We will take a site we developed as an example, FitPro Online Personal Training. The goal of FitPro is to covert users looking for online personal training to clients. Starting off on the home page, you will notice 2 large calls to action right off the bat (as seen below).

Both are simple, “Get Started Now” or if you would like more info, “Take the Tour”. “Get Started Now” will take the user to the membership options where they can sign up for an account, while “Take the Tour” will take the user to a video and photo virtual tour. The wording is strong, active, and straight to the point.

Throughout the site, there is a consistency of call to action regarding signing up, or going on a tour. Another example from an interior page can be seen below.

Notice throughout our examples the images stand out. This is important to catch the user’s eye and to continue to click on it. The possibilities are limitless on what you can do to make it stand out, but remember the goal is to make users see it and to click it not to create an eyesore.

Creating the best call to action requires a lot of testing to see what people prefer and their tendencies specifically related to your site. Although these are general guidelines, they are not definitive. If you have a website and are looking to achieve some goals please contact us for a free consultation to find out what Savvy Panda can do for you.