One of the biggest mistakes that marketers make is forgetting to include calls to action in their promotional content. Calls to action are not only important to include on your website but they should also be integrated into every single blog and social media post you publish.
The reason is simple: your audience needs to know what you want them to do next. If you don’t communicate to your audience what it is you want them to do, they will quickly become confused and lose interest.
Evaluate your landing pages and decide what you want each to accomplish in terms of conversions. How will each landing page fulfill its purpose? What does that look like? Use your response to create one to two calls to action for each page.
Every call to action should be relevant and deliberately achieve your vision for a successful conversion. Your wording should be simple, clear, and concise so there is no uncertainty about the specific action you want your customer to take.
Be mindful not to overwhelm your prospects with too many different calls to action. Keep it to one or two per page—no more. When you start integrating too many calls to action, you go right back to that point of confusing your potential customers and they are likely to navigate away from the page.
Another common mistake on product landing pages is to add too much additional information. Don’t embed video or external links around the conversion option because this will simply distract and confuse your customers. Keep your message and call to action simple and direct.
For example, if you are using a landing page to showcase a certain product with the purpose of generating sales, have the purchase option as the point of conversion and call to action.
In this case, an indirect call to action—such as a “learn more” button—would be less effective for generating the desired conversion (i.e., sale), and having a “learn more” call to action in addition to a purchase call to action would create confusion. This is where you need to be critical and be careful not to overwhelm.
Another example comes from our own company. At Tulip Media, we have a landing page for making a magazine. On this page, the only link available to click is to book a demo or schedule a call with us. So it is very clear to our potential customers what we want them to do when they land on that page.
We purposely don’t have an “about” button or a link to our blog on this landing page. Even though these are pages we love to share with our audience, we know that having these items on our targeted landing page would distract potential customers from the call to action of getting started making a magazine. So, we choose not to have them on this page.
While three or more is too many, you can have two calls to action on an effective landing page. This dual methodology comes from Don Miller. In his books Building a StoryBrand and Marketing Made Simple, Don refers to this as a “transitional call to action.”
In Don’s model, your primary call to action is posted front and center, with a transitional—or “bonus”—call to action below it. This usually takes the form of a drip campaign or something similar that potential customers sign up for.
Whether it’s an e-newsletter, a quiz, a checklist, or a white paper download, integrating something additional below your initial call to action can help keep your users engaged as well as provide you with the contact information to remarket to them later on. This works particularly well for prospects that are not interested in buying now but may become interested later.
If you want to dig deeper into creating effective calls to action and more, we have a variety of tailored program offerings available to help you succeed.
Visit us at www.TulipMediaGroup.com/SMarketing to book a call and find out how we can increase your conversions today.
