Content Creation

Calls To Action: What Are They and Why Do You Need Them?

CopyPress

May 14, 2022 (Updated: March 8, 2023)

You’re getting traffic to your website! But now what? The last thing you want is for your audience to leave, especially because they don’t know what they’re supposed to do. That’s where calls to action (CTA) come in. A call to action is how you direct your audience toward making a purchase. It encourages your website visitors to take that next step in learning more about your company. And when done right, they work surprisingly well. Sounds like some strange magic. But let’s look at the secret ingredients to this marketing spell.

What Is a Call To Action in Marketing?

Image via Giphy by @alexanderirl

A call to action is a prompt on a webpage that encourages a visitor to complete a task. That task varies, but most often it includes a way for the visitor to interact with your business. That includes downloading or reading additional content, signing up for a newsletter, or purchasing a product or service. When businesses use calls to action on their website, they place them on hyperlinks or buttons that visitors can click on. This helps to direct the audience to the right landing pages you want them to visit.

Really, the point of a CTA is to help your audience understand what to do if they want to learn more about your business. And if you compare a website that uses CTAs with one that doesn’t, you’d see the magic at work.

Some people believe that the magic of calls to action stems from how they manipulate people into clicking them. But that’s not where the magic comes from. In reality, the magic stems from the opportunity. If someone comes to your website and falls in love with your content, you want to give them the opportunity to explore or learn more about what you do as a company. Calls to action will never attract someone who wasn’t already looking for it. So the risk of being too pushy, manipulative, or salesy isn’t there.

Call To Action Example

A webpage can have multiple calls to action. In fact, we actually encourage you to include a few of them throughout your content to attract your readers at different points of their journey. It’s also effective to include a CTA at the very bottom of your webpage or written content to boost the recency effect for your readers and viewers. CTAs allow people to get to know you and your business, then immediately see what else you can do for them. Here are a few examples of some of those calls to action you might find on a webpage:

• Sign up now
• Don’t miss out
• Limited time offer
• Download today
• Contact us

Though these types of calls to action are effective, it’s almost always better to relate the CTA to your business and brand. This helps to make them more unique and tell your audience exactly what the action will give them. For example, let’s say you run a landscaping business. Your CTA might read something like “Click here to sign up for our services and trim the price while we trim your hedges.”

Read more: How To Write a Perfect Call To Action

Why Are Calls To Action Important?

Calls to action leave no room for misinterpretation. They provide your audience with explicit instructions on how to get your products or services and the best way to do that. In return, you create quality leads for your business and generate more sales. Of course, not all businesses love the idea of calls to action, and you might be one of them. When done poorly, CTAs can feel pushy. After all, why can’t you just build relationships with your content and let your customers come to you?

Unfortunately, that line of thinking will only cause you to lose potential conversions and sales. Any CTA you’ve ever read that’s felt pushy or salesy was really just bad marketing. A practical and good CTA relates to the material on the page. It tells the reader “Hey! You like reading this? Look at what else we can offer you.” Using an effective CTA in the right place can mean the difference between making a sale or losing a potential customer. Of course, that’s easier said than done.

That’s why at CopyPress, we have an expert team of writers and quality assurance specialists who know where to place the best calls to action and how to entice a target audience. Schedule a call with us today to see how we can help you create high-quality written content that improves your conversion rate and enables you to connect with your website visitors.

Tips for Creating Calls To Action

Here are some additional tips to help you create more effective calls to action:

• Use strong verbs: You want users to know exactly what to do. Whether that’s clicking on something or downloading something, using strong verbs helps them know what action to take with no room for error.
• Provoke emotion: Using tricks like punctuation and potential rewards helps to elicit an emotional response from your audience. Let them know what they might gain from taking the action you want them to.
• Create FOMO: FOMO stands for “fear of missing out.” You want your audience to feel like if they don’t take an action right away, they’re going to miss a great opportunity. Use time-sensitive language and promotions to encourage them to take the action you want.
• Make it stand out: You want your CTA to stand out from the rest of your webpage. This helps attract people’s attention to it and ensure they don’t miss it. Try using things like large, clickable buttons, or embedded forms they can fill out right on the page.

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Director of SEO at Auto Revo

Ed Pronley

CopyPress writer

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