Importance of CTA in Marketing

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Marketers worldwide work towards one main goal: to generate and convert leads. It’s becoming harder to reach it lately, since there are so many new content strategies and technologies emerging every day. Finding and retaining potential customers has never been this difficult. And yet, in order for your business to succeed – it’s essential!

🚀 Read Ecommerce Guide – Introduction & How to Start an Ecommerce Business?

So, the question for marketers now is how to grab the attention of their potential customers? And the more important question, how to keep it long enough to convert them into actual leads?

The answer is a CTA (Call to action). With the help of this marketing tool, you can significantly increase your chances of attracting and converting potential customers.

What is a CTA?

A call to action (CTA) is a marketing term relating to the next step that a marketer wants to take with their audience or readers.

CTAs can be typically placed anywhere within your marketing, website, blog, email, or even within a blog post. One helpful method for getting people to act right away is to add a feeling of urgency and FOMO, such as the sentence “limited time offer.”

Picture 1. Limited time offer example

According to Investopedia:

“The CTA can have a direct link to sales and it can suggest that the reader subscribes to a newsletter that contains product updates, for example. To be effective, a CTA should be obvious and should immediately follow the marketing message.”

Leaving CTAs out or your marketing strategy would certainly be a wrong thing to do, besides losing money. They are essential in directing a prospect to the next step of the sales funnel or process.

Related: How to Improve Sales Funnel with the Help of Live Chat?

So, if you haven’t already included it is a part of a marketing strategy, you should. Because it will be easier to get your target market motivated and to more engage with your content.

Picture 2. CTA example

Typical Call to Action Phrases

Here’s a list of the typical call to action phrases you might find interesting:

• Sign-Up
• Register
• Call
• Subscribe
• Try Now
• Donate
• Buy
• Order
• Share
• Follow
• Download
• Click here for

Benefits of CTA

It leads to visitor conversion and helps you boost your click-through rate. The better your click-through rate, the better your ranking in search engine result pages (SERPs).

Because CTA is a key element on your website, it allows the user to know what to do next. It is estimated that the CTAs will be read by 90%  of people who look at a website.

If a CTA is written within the content, your conversion rate will increase by over 120%. So, without a good implemented CTA, the user may not know the next steps to take and is most likely to leave the site without accomplishing their task.

How to Use CTA in Marketing

A call to action (CTA) in marketing is an instruction intended to provoke an instant reaction from the audience. And usually using an imperative verb such as “call now” or “find out more”.

By having a great marketing campaign where your team develops new products and promotions, just imagine how much would your campaign increase by engaging the right visitor on your website with the right CTAs. Just think about the effectiveness. And that is just one of several ways why CTA marketing is so effective.

Most customers stick around for less than 59 seconds, according to a study by the Nielsen Norman Group. So, you can see that in the first minute when a customer approaches your website, you need to concentrate and get their attention, or you might lose them.

In order to avoid that, you need to proactively engage with your visitors by using right CTAs, at the right time, based on the information you know about your customers.

Use Targeted CTAs

By using these three methods, you can target and convert customers:

Relevant campaigns –mostly used for engaging people to your website with relevant campaigns based on their behavior and interests.

Intent targeting – one of the most effective ways to engage visitors with a relevant CTA; you can find out who your customers are, where are they coming from,  the content of the page a visitor is on, and what intent is indicated by their behavior on your website.

Target based on the stage of the funnel – with ConvertFlow you can connect your email marketing tools and retarget the right customers. This implies that at every point of your marketing funnel you can engage, guide and convert customers with the correct CTAs.

Picture 3. Funnel targeting

Pay Attention to Visual Design

According to studies, you can inspire different emotions if you use dis

According to studies, you can inspire different emotions if you use distinct colors on your website. That means that choosing the right color for your CTA is more important than you think.

To make your CTA stands out, use contrasting colors – colors that stand out.

But at the same moment, it works with your website’s overall design.

WordPress is a good example of such a practice. White CTA buttons not only fit seamlessly into the design of the website but also capture visitor attention instantly.

Picture 4. WordPress example

Also, don’t forget about the shape of the CTA button. It’s up to you, it can be round, circle or square. As long as the visitor can identify it as a button, it’s all good.

But, if you intend playing it safe, here’s a tip – square your buttons. They are one of the most common button shapes as it is simple to recognize them as clickable objects.

Picture 5. CTA button example

Find the Right Spot for Your CTA 

Some 10 years ago internet users spend a whopping 80% of their time above the fold. This is why it was recommended that CTAs get placed at the beginning.

With time and a huge increase in mobile usage, the way people act online has changed dramatically. Scrolling has become normal, and the CTA position has started to depend mainly on what you are trying to achieve.

If your product or service is straightforward, simple and familiar you can place your CTA above the fold. If you’re offering something more complex, something that requires a more thorough explanation and a bigger financial investment – place the CTA at the bottom of the description.

A/B Test Your CTAs

You should run A/B testing to discover the combinations that appeal to your target audience and test the effectiveness of your marketing techniques.

A/B testing is where two variants of a subject are concurrently compared to see which one works better. You compare subjects by showing the two variants, for example, A and B to similar visitors at the same time. The solution that gives a better conversion rate, should be chosen as a winner.

It is well known that each individual will react to multiple calls to action differently. To test the effectiveness of those actions on your website or landing page, you can use an A/B testing platform like Optimizely. This eliminates any guesswork and provides you with data-backed information that helps you optimize for the highest-converting CTAs.

Also, it has been reported that simple A/B tests can up your conversions from 20 to 95 percent, so if you haven’t already tried it, you should.

Picture 6. A/B testing

Final Thoughts

As you can see, CTA marketing is the fastest way to double your conversion rates and generate more leads for products or services.

While other marketing campaigns expect you to invest a substantial amount of time or resources in order to achieve good outcomes, CTA marketing is one of the highest-ROI customer acquisition activities for your business.  

Lastly, don’t forget to test your CTA because every business is different. By constantly measuring and analyzing, you can find out what works best for your customers, leading to a CTA strategy that converts to leads every time.