Tell Me What to Do: How to Create an Irresistible Website Call to Action (CTA)

It's never easy to write a conclusion, let alone a call to action (CTA). You don't want the calls to action on your website to feel bulky, but they need to be informative and purposeful.

Luckily, there are steps you can take to craft irresistible website calls to action, whether you're using them in long or short-form content. Continue reading to learn some of our best tips and tricks for making your CTAs so irresistible to your audience that they’ll have to click through!

What Is a Website CTA?

Let’s start with the basics here: what is the purpose of a call to action? A website call to action, or a CTA, represents more than the conclusion of a piece. 

Simply put, a CTA encourages your reader to engage with your content. CTAs can represent a social sharing prompt, a line of text, or a form submission. It’s right in the title: anything that is a call to the reader to take an action constitutes a CTA. 

What's more, CTAs and CTA buttons tend to vary greatly depending on their creators' intentions. If you want to increase your website leads, you can use a CTA to direct readers toward your products or services. If you want readers to subscribe to your newsletter, you can encourage readers to submit their email addresses to your email marketing platform.

Before you start creating your CTAs, start thinking through what action you want your audience to take and why. 

Why Do Website CTAs Matter?

You want your audience to engage with the content you create. With that in mind, you need to include strong CTAs in your website strategy development. If you leave CTAs by the wayside, your content loses much of its value. 

After all, what’s the point in creating killer content if your website visitor leaves immediately afterward? Not great, right? That’s why you need good CTAs, and lots of ‘em. 

You can specifically use a CTA to:

Encourage Immediate Action From Potential Customers

When you create content to share online, you do so with a goal in mind. No matter what your content looks like, you're looking to generate leads, encourage product sales, stimulate community growth, or foster other forms of engagement.

What's more, you're looking to encourage that engagement while your audience is reading your content or immediately after your audience finishes reading your content. The longer your audience goes without a call to action, the less likely they are to engage with your content in a meaningful way.

If you want to drive engagement, then you need to include multiple CTAs, often in different formats, in the content you share online. By giving your audience frequent and unique opportunities to interact with your work, you can more effectively encourage immediate connections.

Don’t be shy, believe it or not, people love being told what to do (when it comes to websites at least). If you don’t ask your audience to act, then odds are, they won’t. 

Offer Visitors Solutions to Their Problems

Whether you're selling a product or starting an email newsletter, you want your audience to find your content valuable. You want to generate interest in the work that you're doing so that your audience will keep coming back or will otherwise continue to engage with your brand.

With that in mind, your CTAs represent solutions to your audience's problems.

For example, if you’re a service provider, your CTAs should clearly outline how you’ll help and what those next steps look like (for example: book a free consultation today, get a professional estimate now, etc.).

Comparatively, brick-and-mortar shops use CTAs to tell consumers that a product or service can solve a problem in consumers’ day-to-day lives. These CTAs also let consumers know where they can find those products or services.

How to Craft a Successful Website CTA

If you want to build a successful website CTA, you should:

Use Active Voice

Take a look at these two sentences:

• Our product reinvigorates your daily routine
• Our product is liked by productive people

The first of these sentences utilizes active voice. It keeps its subject clear and its message punchy: If you want to reinvigorate your daily routine, you can use the writer's product. The second sentence falls victim to passive voice. Not only is the wording clumsy, but the message also gets obscured by inactive verbs.

If you want to create a successful CTA, you need to use active voice to drive consumer engagement.

Keep It Short

Your audience has a limited attention span, especially today. If you want to drive engagement, your CTA needs to be short. Trigger phrases like "sign up here!" or "click now!" drive action without forcing your audience to slog through several paragraphs of excess language.

Evoke Urgency

Let's take a look at those aforementioned trigger phrases. "Sign up here!" makes for a good CTA because it directs readers' eyes. The only thing that evokes urgency in that CTA, however, is its exclamation point. Comparatively, "click now!" makes the need for engagement seem immediate. Because that "now" is more likely to create a sense of urgency, "click now!" makes for a better CTA.

Why do you have to create a sense of urgency with your CTA? Because the longer your audience goes without acting, the less likely they are to engage with your work. When you make a deal or offer seem fleeting, your audience is going to feel more positive pressure to engage before that offer disappears.

Include Benefits

It's in your best interest to keep your CTA short. That doesn't mean you can't include additional information in your call to action, though. Including benefits, for example, can better encourage audience engagement than a stand-alone "click now!"

Consider our "click now!" example. That's an urgent CTA, but what benefits do audiences get if they follow that link? If we modify the CTA to say, "click now for 50% off your first purchase!" we increase the CTA's appeal. 

Now your audience knows that not only is the need for engagement urgent, but they'll also be rewarded for reacting to the content.

Examples of Successful Website CTAs

We've brought a few different examples of strong CTAs forward here. "Click now!" is effective but not as effective as "click now for 50% off your first purchase!" You can also use a CTA like "Sign up for our newsletter today for access to our subscriber articles!" to drive engagement.

What's more, you can diversify the way you format your CTAs. Here are just some examples of how you can format your CTA:

• CTA button
• Form submission
• Clickable image
• Call to social sharing
• Free trial link
• Interactive quiz
• Contact us button

Now that you’ve seen several examples of strong CTAs, it’s time to put the lesson into practice. If you want us to take a look at your CTAs, schedule a free web audit with us today. We'll teach you everything there is to know about creating successful CTAs while providing you with other tips and tricks to increase the amount of leads you’re getting through your website.