10 Best Practices for Designing Call-to-Action’s that Convert

Lead generation can be a nightmare sometimes.

In an ideal scenario, a potential customer comes to your website, learns all about you, converts, becomes a customer, and you get to have an amazing customer relationship with him.

But let’s be truthful here - a lot of times, customers come to your website, hoping to have an amazing customer journey, only to get lost! This happens if your conversion path is not clear.

This is where CTAs come in; They take your potential customers to a landing page where they can enter their contact information or complete any short form. 

A call-to-action is a link or a button that is placed on your website to convert prospective buyers to leads. Also, a CTA acts as a bridge between the content that your customer is interested in, and a landing page that persuades your customer to complete a form.

Designing CTAs is a skill in itself. Given the fact that humans have a shorter attention span than a humble Goldfish, a CTA must capture a visitor’s attention as fast as possible. Also, a CTA must be in-tune with other elements on the page and must be effectively designed. 

A great CTA is a combination of great text and an effective design. To give you a dose of inspiration for designing CTAs, we’ve listed out 15 CTAs that totally nail it! 

Effective Text

1. Get Specific

Words like “enter” and “submit” have become things of past! Use an action-packed verb to get the visitor’s attention immediately. Your action words must go along with your subject text. To make your CTA brim with effectiveness, be more descriptive about the action. Tell what the user will be getting if they click through. 

Here’s an easy trick to do it - use verbs that reflect a benefit and an action that you want your visitor to complete.

For example, instead of “Sign Up with XYZ”, try using “Reserve your Place with XYZ Now!”.

Learn From - Ekklesia 360

Look how convincing “See How it Works” is! It reflects what the Ekklesia wants the visitor to do. Should we even mention the text above the CTA is as convincing as the CTA itself.

How not to do it - Macy’s

This page is about everything! The cluttered layout and too much text will make you miss the promo code. There is a lot of text about furnitures, mattresses and rugs.

2) Make your USP the CTA

What differentiates you from other businesses in the market? What is it that you are actually offering to the customer apart from the product itself? Try making these your CTA text. Your value proposition might be “Free” or “More” or “Increase”, figure out how to display it the best in your call-to-action button.

Learn From - Netflix

Look how Netflix uses the word “Free” in its CTA. Also, the CTA is very clear in conveying that the subscription is free for a month only. But, look at the text above - it says “Cancel anytime”. With that reassurance, why wouldn’t you join free for a month? 

3) Consistency is the Key

Consistency is very important when it comes to CTA copy. You make to make it very clear to your visitors what they have to do next and why they must do it and so, your CTA must directly reflect the essence of the content that came before it. For example, if your CTA button is at the end of a blog article titled “X Ways to Boost Your Facebook Following” and you want people to sign up for a webinar about social media marketing, don’t feature a CTA that just says, “Sign Up for a Webinar”. Make it reminiscent of the content above like, “Boost your Facebook Following with this free seminar”.

Learn from - Neil Patel

Look at how this text and CTAs as consistent throughout the page. The CTA is clear and synchronous with the tone & subject of the page. 

4) Create a Sense of Urgency

Change your CTAs such that it creates a sense of urgency, NOW! You only have a small amount of time to convince your customers to take action. Hence, you should not offer your customers a chance to procrastinate. An effective CTA will tempt the customer to click on it right then. It is also a good idea to tell your customers what they stand to gain if they take action immediately. How about “Book now to get a 15% discount”?

Learn From - Zynga

Zynga wants you to play. Not later, but NOW! 

5) Use Personal Language

Let your CTA be all about your visitors and how you’re putting them first. They came to your landing page looking to fulfil a need. Show them that you’re here to fulfil their need with your service or product. Also, your CTA should not feel like it is being targeted to a group. Add a personal touch to plain CTAs to make it more effective. See how different “Sign Me Up For This!” is different in tone from “Sign Up”. According to statistics, the second person “Your” constantly outperforms “My”. 

Learn From - Wishpond

This pop-up features a bit of information about their landing page builder and the user is immediately shown a CTA, “Build My Page”. This CTA gives the visitor a feeling of possession and puts them in control.

Effective Designs

6) Use Contrasting Colors

An easy trick to make your CTA stand out is to highlight it and create a contrast with the surrounding content. Vibrant and energetic colors are great for drawing attention and creating contrast. If you are stuck and can’t decide on a particular contrasting color, look at the most common colors or the schema used on your landing page, and pick the opposite color. If you still can’t decide, bright red, orange and lively green always seem to do the trick! 

Learn From - Bath & Body Works

The pink background, white text and the green CTA - the entire element is so well conceived and in tone with their Christmas-sy design. We’re particularly impressed with the choice of colors and how the green button stands out from the pink background!

How not to do it - Mr.Porter

Here’s an example of how having same colors all over the page could possibly affect your conversion rate. In this landing page from Mr. Porter, the “Shop Now” button doesn’t stand out too well. For an user who is just skimming through the page, the CTA would be non-existent!

7) Put it in Place

One very important factor to remember when trying to draw attention on your CTA is its location. While pop-up CTAs have a conversion rate of up to 8%, sidebar CTAs have a conversion rate of 1.5%. If the customer is not able to find a CTA in the right place when they are willing to take action, a valuable sales opportunity might be lost. So, where exactly do you place your CTA? That depends on what the CTA is trying to achieve. If it is for a demo, place it prominently on pages that show intention. If it for a guide book or a webinar, place it towards the end of a blog article. 

Learn From - General Assembly

Look at how General Assembly has strategically placed the “Subscribe” CTA in the end! While there is another CTA, “View Full-Time Courses”, it is clear that both the CTAs have been created for different actions. While one is placed at the middle of the page, “Subscribe” is placed at the bottom to let the user take-in all supporting information and hence, prompting better action.


(By hubspot)

8) Choose the Right Color

Different group of people respond well to different set of colors. While teal attracts people looking for budget options, red-orange attracts impulse buyers. It is very important that you understand the psychology of color and also understand what your average buyers are looking for, before you choose a color. Also, think about the color of your brand. Color association increases brand recognition which in turn, affects consumer confidence.


Source: Wishpond.

Learn From - Macys’

Look at how the red color CTA not only contrasts from surrounding elements but also grabs the attention of customers. It is a simple, clear and direct message placed on the right color that does the trick for Macy’s.

9) Make it Fit In

Sure, bigger CTA’s scream for attention. But having too large a CTA might get lost due to banner blindness. Make sure your CTA element is sized big enough to read. The CTA size must also be mobile compatible. The key is to make the CTA look balanced with other design elements on page. 

Learn From - HowAboutWe

Notice how the CTA size is proportional and balanced with other boxes on the page? Now that’s what we’re talking about!

10) Button Shape

Users press CTA buttons throughout their daily life, all the time. You need to exploit this fact to create CTA designs that immediately tell the users what to do with it. Even though this is an area you can experiment with, you need to ensure that your CTA button looks like one.

Learn from - Wufoo

The background color, the button colors, the neatly formatted text and minimalistic design makes this page a winner. Look at the shape and size of the “Sign Up Free” CTA button that makes you want to click on it! 

How not to do it - Basecamp 3

Albeit a negative lesson, Basecamp’s CTA do tells us a few things. Notice the “See what’s new in 3” button that is designed like a speech balloon. Do you think people will instantly recognize that it is a CTA? If you button does not look like a clickable element, chances are people won’t click it.


Bonus infographic:

Everything You Need to Know About Call-to-Action Buttons

Courtesy of: Synecoretech.

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How to Create Visually Appealing Content and Draw More Traffic

Hear the beats? Can you identify the song? Maybe even sing along!



In a way, animated GIFs are the opposite of radio. Radio gave you the sound and you had to imagine the visuals; GIFs make you imagine the audio given only the visuals.

Visual media has taken over as the primarily consumed web content in the past few years. With improving internet speeds and connectivity, people prefer to watch a clip or scroll through an infographic rather than to read a 1800-word article covering the same topic.

These stats published by Hubspot make a far better point about the importance of visual content in drawing customer attention. Now that we have established visual appeal as the key to modern marketing, let’s have a look into what exactly falls within the sphere of content that could use some flair.

Types of visual content

1. Images and photographs
The first one is pretty obvious. Photos are definitely the highest shared content on social media. With strictly image-sharing social networks like Instagram and Snapchat getting popular in the past few years, the volume is rising higher. Images load fast, can be absorbed even during a scroll-through and can convey the mood of the post in an instant.

2. Videos
Videos are great because they can go into full depth and don’t require accompanying text to convey information. You could show off your product, showcase its features and demonstrate how it works within minutes.

3. Screenshots
The most common use of screenshots are perhaps to share chat logs. Screenshots make it easier to comprehend app interfaces in the same way that it helps us follow a back-n-forth conversation better than a transcript can.

4. Infographics
The surge in infographics shows how facts and figures laid out visually make them far more appealing and easier to consume. Information in a pictorial presentation is easy to absorb, gets shared more and deliver backlinks to your site.

5. Data visualization
Pie-charts, bar graphs and Venn diagrams make even office presentations easier to follow. So, it is no mystery why visual data is preferred over numbers on a sheet by web audience. Information backed by data makes it more credible and it’s easier to identify patterns in the data.

6. Comics
Who doesn’t love comics? Comics are great at projecting your brand personality, showing your fun side and capturing a social media following. Check out @browserling on Twitter who posts comics that relates to their product and dabbles in content which fits in with their audience.

7. GIFs
GIFs or GIFs, however you pronounce it, doesn’t matter because these animated images don’t involve audio. The advantage of using GIFs over video is that they autoplay and immediately draw the viewer’s attention. A GIF of your product in action is way better at conveying what to expect out of it than putting together a tutorial. GIFs also work well in CTAs and outreach emails and a well-timed reaction GIF is a novelty of our times.

8. Fonts
Now this is important because it is the clincher to visual appeal in text. Fonts are also an element of a consistent brand image. Use of a swanky font might grab attention but it is very distasteful in the body of your text. Aim for a clean, consistent look even in long-form content with headings and subheadings and the occasional change in style to convey tone. YEAH, it really works!

Visual appeal comes from the use of these elements that tie in well with the site and company’s profile. The Call-to-Action (CTA) boxes and featured images in posts should be eye-catching, use of colours should be consistent and the layout should have an order to it. All these make the content easy to absorb even in a scan-through.

Content Land: Find the Best Type of Visual for Your Objectives and Content

Source: Marketo.

Figuring out your brand’s visual story

If visual content is new to your marketing strategy, it’s best to start by being consistent in your approach. The content should be engaging to your target audience, not just the space their in. To figure out your brand’s visual story, try answering the following questions:

What is the goal your content is trying to achieve?

Who is your audience and what topics interest them?

What problems do you try to resolve?

What adjectives would best describe the look and feel you are trying to model?

How would you define your brand vision and what makes you unique?

Under what terms do you want to show up for in search engines?

Once you have a clear picture of how you want to present your brand or product, you should align your old content to suit the same brand story. It is also convenient to repurpose your previous written content into visuals. That would draw fresh attention to your stale content and make your business insights easier to take in. 

The guide to visual design

Before you start though, it’s important to understand what makes some visuals more aesthetically pleasing than others. You won’t need a complex understanding of art psychology or design prowess to make your content eye-catching. Let’s start with some design patterns that occur in nature and appeal to us because of its symmetry in proportion.

The golden ratio

The Fibonacci sequence is a series of numbers where the next number is the sum of the previous two.

Starting from 0, we get

0 + 1 = 1

1 + 1 = 2

1 + 2 = 3

2 + 3 = 5

3 + 5 = 8

5 + 8 = 13 (you get the idea)

So the sequence is

0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34…

But why are we talking math when I said ‘nature’? Because Fibonacci numbers appear all around us in naturally occurring patterns.

Bear with the math for just a bit longer.

Now, when a number in the Fibonacci sequence is divided by the one before it, it gives you the golden number Phi (Φ).

1.618

The golden ratio is the visual representation of the golden number.

How do you apply this golden ratio to your visuals?

Using the golden ratio, the ratio of the smaller segment to the larger is equal to the ratio of the larger segment to the sum of both segments.

So in the context of designing a feature image of height 445 pixels, the width should be

445 x 1.618 = 720 pixels (The sum of both sides 720 + 445 = 1165 divided by the larger side 720 gives 1.618).

The ratio can be used to create other golden shapes as well. You could read more about using the golden ratio in design in this guide.

The Rule of Thirds

One of the principal rules in Photography, the Rule of Thirds, makes elements sync up in our sight and therefore, easier to grasp. You have divide the image in a grid of thirds and line up key elements with the intersections.

Color psychology

Colors have deep emotional associations. Take some time to figure out which colors represent your brand values best and pick a palette to match. Maintain a consistent color palette across your site and shared visuals on social media.

Tasteful text

People don’t want to invest time in reading something they might not finish. So, your articles must have a balanced spacious feel to invite them in. Visual content is about using images, videos and GIFs to break apart blocks of text and keep the audience going.

Rule of thumb here is to have, at least, one image every 350 words or so. A few things to keep in mind when picking these visuals:

Natural lighting

Authentic look

Emotionally compliments the text

Consistency of style and color

Readers don’t go through every word on the page. They scan through to get a gist of the idea, which is why it is important to have headlines and subheadings to guide their attention. In fact, they absorb only the first three and the last three words in a headline as they glance over to decide which post deserves a click. Do you remember the title of this post ( barring the “How to” and “draw more traffic” bits)?

So draw them in with a headline and provide subheadings to help the reader subconsciously follow the text.

Some other elements that help break down the wall-of-text effect are:

Lists - bullets or numbers (see what I did there?)

Blockquotes

Text styles (bold, italics, etc.)

Short paragraphs

It’s good to have a voice in your writing that can hook the reader’s attention as well (yeah, you!).

Hierarchy of design

Design can be used to guide focus to the important elements first and trail on to the other elements. Our mind follows a pattern when taking in information.

People take in images before text

The larger elements draw more attention

Colorful elements are where the eye instantly drifts

Images of people grip attention better than generic images

So figure out the important elements on your site (a CTA, offers etc) and use what you’ve learnt to emphasize those elements to new visitors.

Emotional strings through visuals

Visuals are great at conveying emotions. Also, making an emotional connection is really vital in retaining the engagement made with the customer. At first, identify the emotion you want to instil

as your brand identity. The images you use should align with these emotions across all of your marketing media.

Your brand’s official social media profiles are a good place to show off your brand image. Plus fan engagement over social media helps build a dedicated customer base. Post customer images featuring your product, retweet and share content with them on Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat with fresh visuals regularly.

Create visible visuals

For maximum visibility across search engine results, optimize your visuals using these SEO tactics.

Go for fast loading images that maintain quality

Use unique images that relate to the text on a context through which Google can relate the two

Use labels. You should fill in alt attributes, title tags and image names when you post

Use schema markups on your images so that Google can recognize the information within

Resources and tools

So here’s a quick list of resources to get you started on your visual content creation.

Editing Images:

Canva

Skitch

PlaceIt

Snapseed (mobile app for edits on the go)

Charts and infographics:

Infogr.am

PiktoChart

Venngage

Video creation:

Camtasia (my go-to video editor)

GoAnimate

Rapt Media

ThingLink

Instagram Stories, Snapchat and Periscope

Other tools:

Type Genius (find a font for your designs)

Pictaculous (generate color palettes)

ColorZilla (browser extension color picker)

Free Stock photos:

Unsplash

Pexels

Pixabay

Perks of visual content

In studies that look at the correlation between the human brain, visuality and learning, NYU psychologist Jerome Bruner found that people only remember 10% of what they hear and 20% of what they read, but about 80% of what they see.

That’s a significant difference. Visual content also has three major advantages over other forms of content.

Appeal

Information presented through design is stimulating, attractive and engaging.

Comprehension

The human brain interprets visual information faster and more efficiently than it processes other communication

Retention

Our visual processing system serves long term memory better, connecting visual data to previous information stored in our brain. This means visual content is more retainable.

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Strategic SEO Decisions to Make Before Website Design and Build

The aim: This post highlights SEO areas that need to be addressed and decided on before the website brief is sent to designers and developers.

Imagine a scenario: a client asks what they should do to improve their organic rankings. After a diligent tech audit, market analysis, and a conversion funnel review, you have to deliver some tough recommendations:

“You have to redesign your site architecture,” or

“You have to migrate your site altogether,” or even

“You have to rethink your business model, because currently you are not providing any significant value.”

This can happen when SEO is only seriously considered after the site and business are up and running. As a marketing grad, I can tell you that SEO has not been on my syllabus amongst other classic components of the marketing mix. It’s not hard to imagine even mentored and supported businesses overlooking this area.

This post aims to highlight areas that need to be addressed along with your SWOT analysis and pricing models — the areas before you design and build your digital ‘place’:

• Wider strategic areas
• Technical areas to be discussed with developers.
• Design areas to be discussed with designers.

Note: This post is not meant to be a pre-launch checklist (hence areas like robots.txt, analytics, social, & title tags are completely omitted), but rather a list of SEO-affecting areas that will be hard to change after the website is built.

Wider strategic questions that should be answered:

1. How do we communicate our mission statement online?

After you identify your classic marketing ‘value proposition,’ next comes working out how you communicate it online.

Are terms describing the customer problem/your solution being searched for? Your value proposition might not have many searches; in this case, you need to create a brand association with the problem-solving for specific customer needs. (Other ways of getting traffic are discussed in: “How to Do SEO for Sites and Products with No Search Demand”).

How competitive are these terms? You may find that space is too competitive and you will need to look into alternative or long-tail variations of your offering.

2. Do we understand our customer segments?

These are the questions that are a starting point in your research:

• How large is our market? Is the potential audience growing or shrinking? (A tool to assist you: Google Trends.)
• What are our key personas — their demographics, motivations, roles, and needs? (If you are short on time, Craig Bradford’s Persona Research in Under 5 Minutes shows how to draw insights using Twitter.)
• How do they behave online and offline? What are their touch points beyond the site? (A detailed post on Content and the Marketing Funnel.)

This understanding will allow you to build your site architecture around the stages your customers need to go through before completing their goal. Rand offers a useful framework for how to build killer content by mapping keywords. Ideally, this process should be performed in advance of the site build, to guide which pages you should have to target specific intents and keywords that signify them.

3. Who are our digital competitors?

Knowing who you are competing against in the digital space should inform decisions like site architecture, user experience, and outreach. First, you want to identify who fall under three main types of competitors:

• You search competitors: those who rank for the product/service you offer. They will compete for the same keywords as those you are targeting, but may cater to a completely different intent.
• Your business competitors: those that are currently solving the customer problem you aim to solve.
• Cross-industry competitors: those that solve your customer problem indirectly.

After you come up with the list of competitors, analyze where each stands and how much operational resource it will take to get where they are:

• What are our competitors’ size and performance?
• How do they differentiate themselves?
• How strong is their brand?
• What does their link profile look like?
• Are they doing anything different/interesting with their site architecture?

Tools to assist you: Open Site Explorer, Majestic SEO, and Ahrefs for competitor link analysis, and SEM rush for identifying who is ranking for your targeted keywords.

Technical areas to consider in order to avoid future migration/rebuild

1. HTTP or HTTPS

Decide on whether you want to use HTTPS or HTTP. In most instances, the answer will be the former, considering that this is also one of the ranking factors by Google. The rule of thumb is that if you ever plan on accepting payments on your site, you need HTTPS on those pages at a minimum.

2. Decide on a canonical version of your URLs

Duplicate content issues may arise when Google can access the same piece of content via multiple URLs. Without one clear version, pages will compete with one another unnecessarily.

In developer’s eyes, a page is unique if it has a unique ID in the website’s database, while for search engines the URL is a unique identifier. A developer should be reminded that each piece of content should be accessed via only one URL.

3. Site speed

Developers are under pressure to deliver code on time and might neglect areas affecting page speed. Communicate the importance of page speed from the start and put in some time in the brief to optimize the site’s performance (A three-part Site Speed for Dummies Guide explains why we should care about this area.)

4. Languages and locations

If you are planning on targeting users from different countries, you need to decide whether your site would be multi-lingual, multi-regional, or both. Localized keyword research, hreflang considerations, and duplicate content are all issues better addressed before the site build.

Using separate country-level domains gives an advantage of being able to target a country or language more closely. This approach is, however, reliant upon you having the resources to build and maintain infrastructure, write unique content, and promote each domain.

If you plan to go down the route of multiple language/country combinations on a single site, typically the best approach is subfolders (e.g. example.com/uk, example.com/de). Subfolders can run from one platform/CMS, which means that development setup/maintenance is significantly lower.

5. Ease of editing and flexibility in a platform

Google tends to update their recommendations and requirements all the time. Your platform needs to be flexible enough to make quick changes at scale on your site.

Design areas to consider in order to avoid future redesign

1. Architecture and internal linking

An effective information architecture is critical if you want search engines to be able to find your content and serve it to users. If crawlers cannot access the content, they cannot rank it well. From a human point of view, information architecture is important so that users can easily find what they are looking for.

Where possible, you should look to create a flat site structure that will keep pages no deeper than 4 clicks from the homepage. That allows search engines and users to find content in as few clicks as possible.

Use keyword and competitor research to guide which pages you should have. However, the way pages should be grouped and connected should be user-focused. See how users map out relationships between your content using a card sorting technique — you don’t have to have website mockup or even products in order to do that. (This guide discusses in detail how to Improve Your Information Architecture With Card Sorting.)

2. Content-first design

Consider what types of content you will host. Will it be large guides/whitepapers, or a video library? Your content strategy needs to be mapped out at this point to understand what formats you will use and hence what kind of functionality this will require. Knowing what content type you will producing will help with designing page types and create a more consistent user interface.

3. Machine readability (Flash, JS, iFrame) and structured data

Your web pages might use a variety of technologies such as Javascript, Flash, and Ajax that can be hard for crawlers to understand. Although they may be necessary to provide a better user experience, you need to be aware of the issues these technologies can cause. In order to improve your site’s machine readability, mark up your pages with structured data as described in more detail in the post: “How to Audit a Site for Structured Data Opportunities”.

4. Responsive design

As we see more variation in devices and their requirements, along with shifting behavior patterns of mobile device use, ‘mobile’ is becoming less of a separate channel and instead is becoming an underlying technology for accessing the web. Therefore, the long-term goal should be to create a seamless and consistent user experience across all devices. In the interest of this goal, responsive design and dynamic serving methods can assist with creating device-specific experiences.

Closing thoughts

As a business owner/someone responsible for launching a site, you have a lot on your plate. It is probably not the best use of your time to go down the rabbit hole, reading about how to implement structured data and whether JSON-LD is better than Microdata. This post gives you important areas that you should keep in mind and address with those you are delegating them to — even if the scope of such delegation is doing research for you (“Give me pros and cons of HTTPS for my business” ) rather than complete implementation/handling.

I invite my fellow marketers to add other areas/issues you feel should be addressed at the initial planning stages in the comments below!

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