1. Convey Value
Your Call to Action should answer the question, “What’s in it for me?” Think about the top two or three benefits of your offer, and try to list them in order of priority. Then, pick the most critical one, and shorten it to just a few words. In that way, you will highlight the key point of engagement and ensure there is alignment between your ad and the offer.
2. Create Urgency
Creating urgency is another quality your calls-to-action need to adopt. In order to effectively create urgency, you need to answer your visitors' question of “Why should I do this now?” Simply stating such is far to over-used to create any real sense of unrgency. You must be more creative. For instance, you can emphasize seasonality, special
| HubSpot Social Media Scientist Dan Zarrella conducted some research to determine the ideal length of a press release headline to get people clicking, and found that the sweet spot was between 90 and 150 characters. |
discounts, or even use adverbs like “now” and “today.” One example of such a call-to-action would be “Subscribe to Our Newsletter Today for Access to All Marketing Goodness.” You never want to allow your reader to question why they are paying attention to you.
3. Make it Personal
Personalization of calls-to-action is tricky...but not impossible. If you know where on your website the visitor currently is and what they are reading, you’re more or less familiar with their preferences and needs. For example, if they are on your About Us page, they are probably looking to discover more information about your company. So the CTA here could point visitors to your careers page with a nice personal touch like “Like our culture? Become a part of it!”
4. Include Testimonials
Testimonials are very effective as calls-to-action, because they offer objective endorsement and motivate visitors to take the next step and click through to your landing page. It's always more powerful to have someone else saying how great you are than saying it yourself. A customer quotation can often capture all the information a prospective customer needs to know. While testimonials are most frequently used for products with longer sales cycles (like those of B2B companies), B2C companies and nonprofits can also experiment with this tactic.
5. Include Numbers
Another best practice around writing calls-to-action is to include numbers. “When people are surfing the web, they are looking for specificity,” says HubSpot Social Media Scientist Dan Zarrella. In this context, data helps you cut through the clutter of vague content and convey a strong message. If the goal of your call-to-action is to grow your email database, you can invite people to subscribe by informing them of the number of recipients you currently have. If you are promoting an ebook or a whitepaper, you might want to mention its length. You can take that concept and start including data around your customer base, industry reports, and more. Statistics convey credibility and affirm you as an industry expert.
6. Turn it Into a Bonus
Often, the goal of your call-to-action is to keep visitors engaged on your website, jumping from one page to the next. You can accomplish this by introducing your CTAs as bonus offers or opportunities to get more out of another campaign. For example, if a visitor just downloaded your newsletter, you can send them an email with a call-to-action that is introduced as a special bonus based on your visitor’s activity. An example of this would be text along the lines of, “Thanks for downloading our ebook about successful email marketing. You now have access to our bonus resources on website optimization.”
7. Make it Newsworthy
If you are feeling especially creative with your calls-to-action, try to piggyback on newsworthy content. Is there something in the news that could pertain to your industry or offers? You could also put a fun or controversial spin on it. Start by setting up Google Alerts for some industry keywords related to your business then check Google News for that catchy headline you can use.
8. Be Confident in Your Language
Be confident when you promise your visitors to help them with their challenges. Examples of this would be a call-to-action along the lines of “Everything You Need to Know About Inbound Marketing” or “The Only Email Marketing Guide You Need.”
9. Ask Questions
Another tactic for crafting your calls-to-action is to use a question, followed by a brief response. This is a general copywriting tip that works in many channels -- emails, blog posts, and landing pages. Questions offer a non-threatening way to predict what visitors might be interested in and pique their interest.
10. Be Subtle
Smart and subtle language can also help you generate high click-through rates on your call-to-action. “People like to believe that everything they do stems from some logical, un-manipulateable part of their own brain,” Dan Zarrella explains. If you are successfully subtle, you've suggested the action you want a vistor to take in such a way that it feels like their own idea. (see the movie Inception with Leonardo DiCaprio if you want a mind blowing trip on this topic) Experiment with language that is less commanding and more thought-provoking.