A visitor lands on your site, reads, takes an interest, and leaves without doing anything. In most cases the problem is not your offer. It is your call to action. A badly worded, badly placed or badly presented call to action costs you customers every day, silently.
Why most calls to action do not prompt action
Generic calls to action such as 'Click here', 'Learn more' or 'Contact us' share one flaw: they do not say what the visitor is going to get. HubSpot has shown that personalised calls to action convert up to 202% better than generic versions. The difference is also psychological: Nielsen Norman Group recommends using the first person in button copy to strengthen the visitor's personal involvement.
Rule worth remembering: your call to action has to answer the question 'What do I get if I click?' in under 5 words. If you have to explain, the wording is too vague.
The rules of a call to action that genuinely converts
- An action verb in the first person: 'Get my quote', 'Book my place', 'Download the guide'
- An immediate promise: say what the visitor receives, not what they have to do
- A design that cuts through: the button has to stand out visually from the rest of the page
- A position after the value has been demonstrated, never before
Your button's colour matters, but not for the reason people think. It is not red or green that converts best: it is the contrast with the background. Unbounce shows that a visually indistinct call to action loses a large share of its clicks. Crazy Egg offers heatmaps for measuring the attention actually paid to each zone of your page, calls to action included.
Testing and improving your calls to action with the right tools
The best call to action is the one your visitors have validated. Microsoft Clarity lets you see exactly where people click through session recordings. To test variants, VWO and Hotjar let you run A/B tests directly on your buttons. For the complete method, our guide to A/B testing gives you the full framework for starting.
If you change one thing on your site this week: replace 'Contact us' with 'Get my free quote'. It is the quickest test to put in place and often the most profitable.