Website Audit-Testing Different Call to Action Techniques

Reading some of the great books from the Eisenberg brothers got me thinking about ‘Calls To Action’ as part of your website audit.

Persuasive momentum is a term used to describe the progressive decision making process that aligns customer goals with our own business goals. You can build and sustain persuasive momentum by intentionally and repeatedly providing answers to the following questions:

Who are we trying to persuade to take the action?

What is the action we want someone to take?

Are we testing multiple “Call to Action” methods?

Is our potential customer confident when taking that action?

When carrying  a website audit it is clear that images and icons are great for getting people’s attention and training them to relate content with reward. You can test different “call to action” methods with colors, placement, size, and text on multiple pages on your website.

You can also offer ‘Multiple Calls to Action’ per webpage. Some people click on the first link they see on a landing page. Others read for long stretches before they take action.

You can experiment with different A/B testing methods on “call to action” buttons or images, seeing which elicits a greater response. Or you can use different colours to make certain “call to action” buttons stand out, depending on your target audience.

There are so many important factors to consider when it comes to converting website visitors into paying customers.After spending much of your time trying to get  your website more visible on the web via well thought out Internet Marketing Strategies, it would be a shame to throw all that work away just because you did not implement a well planned “Call to Action” Strategy.

Here are 8 important factors to take into account when conducting a website audit for “Call to action” techniques:

1. Colour

The color of your ‘Call to Action’ should stand out from the rest of the page. Here’s is  a great study done by SEO Smarty on “Call to Action” Colour implications:

call to action colour techniques

You will find that you can get a good idea of which of these colors your target audience might respond to when compared with others. Overall, “orange” seems to be the most effective call to action color, while “red” seems to scare people away!

2. Location

A large number of website visitors do not scroll down the page. For this reason your primary call to action should be located above the fold.

It should at least be located where the user would expect to find it easily. Eg: beside a product, in the header, top right navigation; it should be obvious and not hard to find.

Here’s an example of our primary call to action to sign up for our free SEO software trial. This button is located on the top right of our most popular webpages.

On the other hand, our secondary call to action button seen here which has the same function, can be found in less obvious areas around the page, and sometimes below the fold.

This is just in case a potential customer might log onto our site and start reading its content and scroll down before he/she notices our primary call to action. These seem like obvious things for a web designer to do, however you would be surprised how ofter multiple call to action techniques are ignored,relying heavily on just one per webpage.

3. Language

The language you use to communicate with your user is important. It should be short, to the point and should start with an action verb like “signup”, download, create, or “call us now”.

You should give the user a reason to click on your call to action button, ‘free‘ being the number one incentive.

4. Don’t Flood the page

By limiting the number of choices a user has to make we reduce the amount of mental effort. Effectively you guide the user around the site step by step.

The number of appropriate actions will vary from site to site. However, it is not so much the number of actions as the distinctiveness of each.

Try different subject headers, if you’re using solo email messages to drive traffic there. Optimize different landing pages for different search terms related to your business.

You should design your call to action delivery techniques according to your target audience.For example, You could create a wiki that a certain demographic might find interesting. Or perhaps make a video demo in an attempt to lure others into buying your services. For more instinctive people who need less persuasion, you might use a “buy now button”.

5. Tell users what to expect – Don’t make them “land” somewhere they don’t want to!

Website visitors are sometimes hesitant to believe things they’re presented with on the web at face value.

Through experience, their trust has been burnt before by that promise of free service only to find out that they’d have to put in their credit card numbers to get what they want.

To increase click conversion and to build trust, anticipate users’ skepticism and tell them what they will gain by clicking on certain links. If you offer something, then make sure you carry that offer through or you will find an agitated potential customer clicking the back button!

6. No Clutter

Your button shouldn’t be overcrowded with other elements. It needs sufficient margins so it can be distinguished and the text needs enough padding so it’s easy to read

Use whitespace effectively.The use of whitespace around a call to action button is an effective way of making it stand out in areas where there are many elements.

7. Revisit Your Encore Page:

That’s the page you get after someone has submitted their information for that PDF download or made a purchase or subscribed to a newsletter. You want to try diverting them to your main site or other area of interest after you have converted them or made a sale on a product.

8. Be Consistent

Consistency in design elements across all pages makes a user more likely to choose one of the persistent elements.

Make sure your primary “call to action” is in the same place on every page. If it’s in the right place, it will eventually be noticed no matter what webpage the potential customer is on.

…Have you optimized your website correctly?

…Have you done a website audit on  your own recently? What kind of factors did you examine?

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