First of all a call-to-action is your offer to a visitor to your website to take a desired action. For instance to add-to-cart one of your products or services, or alternatively to collect that visitor’s email details so that you can build a rapport with them over time. Let’s take a look at some effective call to actions.

1. Amazon Call to Action

Amazon has the most copied call to action on the internet, and for good reason – because it works the best. Let’s take a quick look at what they do, that works so well for them:

Typically the Amazon call to action is an orange button, with navy blue text. The text in the button reads “Add to Cart”. This verbage is non-threatening and get’s them commiting slowly to the sales funnel process.

Also note that an image of an iphone is displayed, along with descriptive headline, ratings, price, and product details. The visitor knows what they are going to get.

This approach is clear and straight forward and works extremely well for countless online advertisers.

2. Driving Online Sales Call to Action

I was hunting all over the place for a decent optin call to action, but for some reason my googling skills are pretty weak today. So I’ll just refer to the simple call to action that I use on this blog.

First of all I use a headline that communicates to a specific audience (local business owners wanting to expand their business using the internet). Then I show a video and walk through the opportunities available to their business online.

My optin form is really just a contact form, and from there I organize a free consultation in order to determine whether me and my clients are a good fit to work together (i.e. we can both get value from the relationship).

Video sales letters tend to convert better than traditional text web pages because 6 out of 7 people prefer watching rather than reading. This is not always the case, and it will depend on your target audience. So it is worth split testing this approach to see which works better.

Again notice the Amazon style big orange button with navy blue text. The call to action is simply ‘Send Request’.

3. John Chow Call to Action

The marketing blog at JohnChow.com uses a popover to grab your attention. It is kind of disruptive, but the plus side is that you can’t ignore it. So there is a trade off to using this approach. Notice that John shows you an image of what he is giving you for free. Getting offered something free that could potentially make you $40k per month would be kind of compelling I think, especially if you had never seen this type of thing before (affiliate marketing hype).

The purpose of this call to action is to get the visitor to subscribe to an email marketing list. Then John will proceed to send that reader useful messages over time on how to market on the internet successfully. And periodically he will send his readers a marketing message where he will make profits from any sales that result from the message.

Call to Action Messages

Here are some common call to actions that I see a lot:

• add to cart
• call now
• buy now
• get a quote
• act now
• get it now
• get started
• find out more
• get your free … now
• limited time offer

Conclusion

Your website and/or specific pages on your website should have clear and effective call to actions. Just one last note, your call to action should be taylored to your target audience, and to avoid confusion you really should only have one call to action on your page. These last points will help increase your conversions.

Recommeded further reading on creating an effective call to action – http://boagworld.com

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1. Here Some Web Designs That I Really Like, and Why
2. Display Advertising in Europe – More Effective than USA?
3. 10 Functional Web Designs For Your Business
4. Are You Using Website Tracking & Analytics Yet?
5. Small Business Effective Productivity Measurements

Tagged as: call to action, conversion