What makes a good call to action?

You have great content. Your website readers are engaged, inspired, and ready to take the plunge. They believe in you! With their wallet in hand, they’re ready to donate to your cause, book an appointment for your service, or buy your product. Congrats!

But wait. 

They can’t find the button. You know, the “LET’S IMPROVE OUR LIVES TOGETHER BY ENGAGING IN A BUSINESS RELATIONSHIP OF SORTS” button. The call to action.

Every single time you engage with a customer or potential customer (and by customer I also mean buyer, client, donor, or [insert your own term here]), you need to ensure they know exactly where to go next. This is true within any channel: on your website, on social media, in a printed brochure, and even in verbal conversation. Yes, every. single. time. This goes for nonprofit audiences and business audiences (who, as we know, aren’t really all that different). 

Failing to include a clear call to action can have a few consequences you surely want to avoid:

• It can create confusion for your customer, which weakens their trust in you

• It can indefinitely stall out the buying process

• It can leave room for quick distractions that take them away from engaging further with you

On the flip side, having a well-timed call to action can close the deal and build trust, and take your customer one step closer to being delighted by what you’re offering. 

There are a few key components to an excellent call to action:

• Placement

• Content

• Clarity

Placement

Your call to action needs to be in a place that makes sense. If we’re talking about a webpage, it should live after some amount of content, and/or at the bottom of the page. Just like with a verbal conversation, you don’t want to open with, “Book a free consult now!”. Make sure the call to action is logically positioned. This could be halfway through the content, next to a particular product benefit, or at the very end.

Content

Calls to action should be short, engaging, and they should align with your customer’s journey. That is, you want to meet your customer or prospective customer where they are. Maybe they need to subscribe to your newsletter before booking a consult with you; in this case, your call to action might be “subscribe now.” Or perhaps they’re on the Our Services page, and they are ready to book an appointment; then, your call to action could read “book a session.”

The other important consideration about content is the specific action you want your customer to take. This is a call to action, after all! Your calls to action should include a verb that resonates with your customer. A simple “subscribe now” is much more urgent and compelling than “newsletter signup form,” for example.

Clarity

Clarity is, perhaps, the most important factor in creating a call to action that gets results. Yes, the content needs to be clear, as discussed above. But beyond that, the exact next step you want your customer to take needs to be clear. 

Say you have a webpage that is useful to many types of customers in many different phases of the buyer’s journey. You’d like customers to be able to subscribe to your newsletter, to share your content with a friend, and to book an appointment. Those are three different actions, so you’ll need three different calls to action. 

While it can be tempting to include all different calls to action within close proximity to each other, the result is that your customers are more likely not to take any next action. It’s the paradox of choice: while we may think we want more choices, having more choices is actually more taxing, and leaves us less satisfied with our final decision.

So, how can you help create clarity for your customer?

Do the work for them. Clarify for yourself what the single top priority is for customers on that particular webpage. Then make that call to action the most prominent. Next, decide which call to action is second most important, and place that such that it will not compete for attention. Finally, take your least important call to action, and include it on your website in an unobtrusive way. 

For example, maybe you decide the order of importance here is:

1. Book an appointment

2. Subscribe to the newsletter

3. Share content with a friend

You may set up your calls to action as follows:

1. Place a “book an appointment” button in the top right corner of your main site menu, and maybe again within the content that describes the services you offer

2. Place your “subscribe now” button in the site footer, where you mention that you have a newsletter

3. Include a small icon at the top and/or bottom of each page of content where readers can share the page with a friend

All of the above elements should be considered for every piece of engagement you have with a client. For each piece of marketing or communications material you create, ask yourself: what do I want and expect a customer to do next? Then, simply show them the way.

The better you make their experience, the more delighted they’ll be to work with you.