Focusing Your Call to Action

In the most general sense, a call to action is a way to ask your readers to do something. This could be purchasing something, signing up for something, or donating something, or anything else that asks the users to take an action. All too often, though, we see websites which do not utilize their call to action in the right way, making it fairly useless. There are many ways that you can make your call to action something that truly helps you to reach your goals with your website.

Great Ideas

In the popular movie Field of Dreams, the main character hears a voice whisper “if you build it, they will come”. When it comes to a call to action, you’re basically doing the same thing. You need to fill the need of the user before they’ll be willing to complete the call to action. One of the best ways to do this is to explain to the user what they’re going to be doing if they complete your call to action. For example, if they complete your call to action, will they be getting a newsletter, or some sort of a product? If your client knows what they’ll be getting when they do as you ask, they’ll be much more likely to do as you want them to do.

Sometimes you need to offer a little incentive to get them to do as you wish. Incentives can be a variety of things, including discounts, small gifts, or even entry into a competition where they can win something. By offering the user something, you’re giving them a good reason to want to do as you ask them to do, giving you both what you want out of the deal.

One thing to make sure that you do is to avoid using too many calls to action. If you have too many on the site, your users may get confused, or may feel as though you’re asking too much from them. This is a surefire reason for them to leave or to ignore everything that you’re asking from them. When you’re planning out the site, make sure that you only have a few calls to action instead of having dozens of them. This will encourage your customers to do what you’d like them to do and will give you a greater chance of getting the results that you’re hoping for from your users.

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