Mark O'Brien's web development business management blog

Website Calls to Action

March 18, 2009 at 7:00 pm by Mark O'Brien

Many of us think about getting large amounts of high quality traffic to our websites. This is obviously a necessary element for online success, but most people don't think about what to do with that traffic once it arrives.

Mark Greco, a consultant at HubSpot, told me a while back that "if the only call to action on your site is your contact form, you're missing the boat." We were guilty of this at the time, as are most website owners. As marketers, our job is to make it very easy for conversions to happen on our site. This means creating expert content, and making sure it is easily indexed by Google, but it also means making it easy for your visitors to choose to get closer to you, to learn more about you, to hear from you regularly.

Calls to action must be clear and present
There should be calls on almost all of your pages, and they need to be clearly identifiable. You'll see an example of this in the right sidebar of this page.

Calls to action must be compelling
These calls have to build on the momentum you've created. The traffic is on your site for some reason, look to the causes to understand what more people would probably want form you. In our case, people come to us for our content, so we use two of our three calls to action to invite them to have access to even more content, and to receive our content in an automated way, through email or RSS.

Calls to action must be easy to say yes to
Don't make your audience jump through hurdles to act on your calls. Make them quick and easy to act on.

Below are some examples of CTA we've used, and what our thought patterns are around them.

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Benefit to the client: Necessary education
What you're really saying: "Allow us to remind you, as often as you'd like, that we exist exclusively to serve firms just like yours"

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Benefit: Motivation, inspiration, necessary education,
What you're really saying: "Allow us to sell you something in an extraordinarily passive way by simply demonstrating our expertise in a live format"

Request: Web Meeting

Benefit to the client: An opportunity to speak with you, the expert, one on one
What you're really saying: "Let us have a call with you to see if we might be a fit"

So, what does this all add up to? Well, in our case, it means that in the past seven days 50 people have voluntarily gotten closer to us by choosing to tell us a little about themselves in exchange for more access to Newfangled and our content. 50 conversions in seven days! ...and last week was actually quiet compared to the first week of the month (87).

Instead of them finding us on Google, reading a nice article and promptly forgetting who we are, we now have set the seed of a relationship with them. Because they acted on one of our CTA, they are going to hear from us at least a few more times. Who knows how many of these 50 might need a website built for them, or someone they know, in the coming years? At least a few, I'm sure, and chances are pretty good that they might think of us when that time comes.

So, I think this is pretty sound proof that this stuff work. I hope you're able to start implementing some smart Calls to Action on your site soon.