Your call to action (CTA) is the chance to motivate your audience to take real steps toward becoming a customer or client. It can be the determining factor between a lead and a conversion.

Many argue that the call to action is the most important part of your site or ad campaign. Skipping the CTA is a grave mistake that won’t bode well for your company.

There is a reason the CTA button has become such a staple on site content and in ad copy.

1. Why Is A CTA Important?

CTAs Motivate Your Sales Funnel:

• CTAs and sales funnels work together to guide users through the buyer's journey.
• CTAs prompt users to take action and move to the next phase of the funnel.
• A well-placed CTA is necessary to provoke the action you want, whether it's visiting a blog, giving contact information, downloading an e-book, or subscribing to an email list.
• CTA wording should highlight the benefits and use best practices to encourage action.

By making the next step easy for users and using a well-designed CTA, you create a better user experience and increase the likelihood of conversions.

Buyers are accustomed to using CTAs, and by giving them a clear route to the next step, you eliminate confusion and facilitate a smooth buying process.

Customers Want Them:

• CTAs are essential for businesses as customers expect them and use them to take the next step.
• Omitting CTAs can confuse readers and hurt your chances of conversion.
• CTA buttons make it easy for customers to engage with your brand, creating a good user experience and benefiting your business.
• Predictability and intuitiveness are essential for CTAs to be effective.
• Strong CTAs are expected in various parts of a campaign, including social media, websites, videos, copy messaging, and digital advertising.

They Boost The Success Of Digital Advertising: 

• CTAs are essential for digital advertising to generate hype, grab attention, and encourage consumers to take action.
• Without the CTA, ad copy messaging may fall flat and fail to inspire customers to take the next step.
• CTAs are especially important in pay-per-click (PPC) advertising to convey the intent of the campaign to the audience.
• A strong and inspiring CTA should be a focal point of ad creative to avoid missed opportunities and competition.
• Emphasize the importance of a strong CTA on your marketing team during the creation of ad campaigns.

2. Examples Of Calls To Action

Here is some call to action examples you might typically see on a blog:

• Read more articles
• Sign-up for our newsletter
• Support our sponsor
• Share on social media

For a B2B company, call to action buttons could feature text such as:

• Get started
• Sign up
• Free Trial
• Contact Sales

An effective call to action clearly communicates what the user can expect when they click on a button or take the next action, which can improve click-through rate.

Whereas on an ecommerce site, the CTAs may be more commercially focused:

• Add to cart
• Checkout
• Buy now
• Add to wishlist

In each case, the CTAs on the page tell the user what action to take next to continue interacting with the site and moving further down the conversion funnel.

3. How To Create Compelling Calls To Action?

Marketers employ a number of strategies for creating effective CTAs. Below is a list of some common ones:

• Good Design: The best calls to action need to grab the user's attention, so a bright button color that contrasts with the color of the page or an email is an effective strategy.
• High Visibility: Because the call to action should be the most noticeable thing on the page, the font size should be large enough to command attention.
• Clear Benefit: Stating a clear benefit that the user will get from completing the transaction is an effective way to get them to click.
• Actionable Text: A call to action, as its name implies, is designed to compel the user to take action, so an effective CTA should use action words such as "discover", "learn more", and "buy now".
• Short in Length: A good call to action should be a short phrase, not a sentence. Most are no longer than five to seven words.
• Sense of Urgency: Users are easily distracted on the internet, so a strong sense of urgency such as a limited time offer can help compel users to take action immediately instead of putting off taking action.

4. How To Use A/B Testing To Test CTAs?

Every audience responds differently to various calls to action. There is no guarantee that one call to action will outperform another.

The overall success of a call to action can be measured via a conversion rate formula that calculates the number of clicks divided by the number of impressions, or times the CTA was seen.

To test the effectiveness of various calls to action on your website or landing page, you can use an A/B testing platform like Optimize. This will eliminate any guesswork and give you data-backed information that helps you optimize for CTA's with the highest conversion.